Constraining Quirky Tracks with Conventional Searches

Quirks are particles that are charged both under the standard model and under a new confining group. The quirk setup assumes there are no light flavors of the new confining group, so that while the theory is in a confining phase, the quirk-antiquirk distance can be macroscopic. In this Letter, we reinterpret existing collider limits, those from monojet and heavy stable charged particle searches, as limits on quirks. Additionally, we propose a new search in the magnetic-field-less CMS data for quirks and estimate the sensitivity. We focus on the region where the confinement scale is roughly between 1 and 100 eV and find mass constraints in the TeV range, depending on the quirk’s quantum numbers.

Figure 1

Track efficiency as a function of confinement scale, $\mathrm{\Lambda }$, for various quirk masses with a magnetic field of $\overrightarrow{B}=(0,0,3.8\mathrm{T})$ at 13 TeV for HSCP events (red) and monojet events (blue). The efficiencies do not asymptote to 0 or 1 at small $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ due to the other track cuts applied (see Table 1).

Figure 2

Track efficiency as a function of confinement scale, $\mathrm{\Lambda }$, for various quirk masses with a magnetic field of $\overrightarrow{B}=0$ at 13 TeV.

Figure 3

The 95% C.L. limits on a color triplet fermionic quirk with $N_c=2$. The red (green) bound comes from HSCP (monojet) searches and the blue bound is our projection for the 0T data. Colored dashed lines correspond to future luminosity projections. The grey dotted lines show contours of ${\ell }_{\mathrm{eff}}$.