Beyond standard model particles in the atmospheric flux: a long-lived stau example

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Bhattacharya, Atri, Reno, Mary Hall, Sarcevic, Ina
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Bhattacharya, Atri
Reno, Mary Hall
Sarcevic, Ina
author_facet Bhattacharya, Atri
Reno, Mary Hall
Sarcevic, Ina
contents We discuss fluxes of long-lived supersymmetric (SUSY) particles produced in the atmosphere from ultra-high energy cosmic-ray interactions with air nuclei. We consider long-lived particle production which proceeds first via the on-shell formation of heavier particles in the SUSY spectrum and then their decays. Specifically, we focus on the production of stau pairs from the decays of squarks produced in the initial cosmic ray-air collision under the purview of gauge-mediated symmetry breaking models that have the stau as the next-to-lightest SUSY particle. The calculation of the resulting stau flux schematically mirrors that of prompt atmospheric neutrino production, however, with the energy scale of initial hadronic collision set to EeV energy scales of the incident cosmic rays rather than the PeV energies where the prompt atmospheric neutrino fluxes dominate over neutrino fluxes from pions and kaons, and with the appropriate stau production cross section. We show the effect of accounting for the energy distribution of the staus relative to the squark energy distributions. We discuss the potential for future ultra-high energy detectors similar in scope to IceCube-Gen2 to detect atmospheric staus via tracks going through the detector volume. Current collider constraints on stau pair production within the SUSY framework considered here are more constraining than those from a detector like IceCube-Gen2 over ten years.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10745
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond standard model particles in the atmospheric flux: a long-lived stau example
Bhattacharya, Atri
Reno, Mary Hall
Sarcevic, Ina
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
We discuss fluxes of long-lived supersymmetric (SUSY) particles produced in the atmosphere from ultra-high energy cosmic-ray interactions with air nuclei. We consider long-lived particle production which proceeds first via the on-shell formation of heavier particles in the SUSY spectrum and then their decays. Specifically, we focus on the production of stau pairs from the decays of squarks produced in the initial cosmic ray-air collision under the purview of gauge-mediated symmetry breaking models that have the stau as the next-to-lightest SUSY particle. The calculation of the resulting stau flux schematically mirrors that of prompt atmospheric neutrino production, however, with the energy scale of initial hadronic collision set to EeV energy scales of the incident cosmic rays rather than the PeV energies where the prompt atmospheric neutrino fluxes dominate over neutrino fluxes from pions and kaons, and with the appropriate stau production cross section. We show the effect of accounting for the energy distribution of the staus relative to the squark energy distributions. We discuss the potential for future ultra-high energy detectors similar in scope to IceCube-Gen2 to detect atmospheric staus via tracks going through the detector volume. Current collider constraints on stau pair production within the SUSY framework considered here are more constraining than those from a detector like IceCube-Gen2 over ten years.
title Beyond standard model particles in the atmospheric flux: a long-lived stau example
topic High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10745