2024/10/11 by Amit Adhikary, Adhikary, Amit, Aoife Bharucha +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.09033
openalex publication_date 2024/10/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The current Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data show no clear indication of new physics and only incremental improvements are anticipated at the energy frontier in the near future. However, while the focus of the LHC has been on constraining TeV scale physics, new particles could still be hiding below the electroweak scale. In order to obtain sensitivity to a new light boson with couplings to SM fermions, a potentially promising decay channel, for resonances with mass \gtrsim \cal O(10) GeV, would be the decay to b b pairs. The measurement of such signatures is challenging due to the trigger requirements at the LHC. In this work, we explore the LHC sensitivity to a light pseudoscalar, or axion-like particle (ALP), in the bb final state with an associated photon, using jet substructure techniques, in the mass range between 10 GeV and 100 GeV. We obtain projected exclusions on the ALP-fermion coupling in a region of phase space which has not so far been probed by direct searches. We further discuss the impact that lower trigger thresholds may have on the LHC reach.