Dynamical Dark Matter, MATHUSLA, and the lifetime frontier

Abstract

MATHUSLA is a proposed surface detector at CERN that would be able to observe the decays of nonhadronic electrically neutral long-lived particles (LLPs) with almost no background or trigger limitations. This would allow MATHUSLA to probe sub-GeV to TeV masses and lifetimes up to cτ∼107 m. MATHUSLA can play an important role in probing dark-matter scenarios involving extended hidden sectors, where additional dark states often manifest as LLPs. A prime example of such a scenario is furnished by the Dynamical Dark Matter (DDM) framework, which intrinsically gives rise to large ensembles of dark states exhibiting a broad range of masses and lifetimes. In this paper, we examine the extent to which MATHUSLA can probe the DDM parameter space, and we demonstrate that MATHUSLA may be capable of providing direct confirmation of certain unique aspects of the DDM framework which might be difficult to probe in other ways.