# A Quantum Diaries Survivor

private thoughts of a physicist and chessplayer

## No CHAMPS in CDF data				January 12, 2009

Posted by dorigo in news, physics, science.
Tags: CDF, Champ, dark matter, new physics, SUSY
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A recent search for long-lived charged massive particles in CDF data has found no signal in 1.0 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions produced by the Tevatron collider at Fermilab.

Most subnuclear particles we know have very short lifetimes: they disintegrate into lighter bodies by the action of strong, or electromagnetic, or weak interactions. In the first case the particle is by necessity a hadron- one composed of quarks and gluons-, and the strength of the interaction that disintegrates it is evident by the fact that the life of the particle is extremely short:  we are talking about a billionth of a trillionth of a second, or even less time. In the second case, the electromagnetic decay takes longer, but still in most instances a ridiculously small time; the neutral pion, for instance, decays to two photons ($\pi^\circ \to \gamma \gamma$) in about $8 \times 10^{-17}$ seconds: eighty billionths of a billionth of a second. In the third case, however, the weakness of the interaction manifests itself in decay times that are typically long enough that the particle is indeed capable of traveling for a while.

Currently, the longest-living subnuclear particle is the neutron, which lives about 15 minutes before undergoing the weak decay $n \to p e \nu$, the well-studied beta-decay process which is at the basis of a host of radioactive phenomena. The neutron is very lucky, however, because its long life is not only due to the weakness of virtual W-boson exchange, but also by the fact that this particle happens to have a mass just a tiny bit larger than the sum of the bodies it must decay into: this translates in a very, very small “phase space” for the decay products, and a small phase space means a small decay rate.

Of course, we have only discussed unstable particles so far: but the landscape of particle physics includes also stable particles, i.e. the proton, the electron, the photon, and (as far as we know) the neutrinos. We would be very surprised if this latter set included particles we have not discovered yet, but we should be more possibilistic.

A stable, electrically-neutral massive particle would be less easy to detect than we could naively think. In fact, most dark-matter searches aimed at detecting a signal of a stable massive particle are tuned to be sensitive to very small signals: if a gas of neutralinos pervaded the universe, we might be unaware of their presence until we looked at rotation curves of galaxies and other non-trivial data, and even then, a direct signal in a detector would require extremely good sensitivity, since a stable neutral particle would be typically very weakly interacting, which means that swarms of such bodies could easily  fly through whatever detector we cook up unscathed. Despite that, we of course are looking for such things, with CDMS, DAMA, and other dark-matter-dedicated experiments.

The existence of a charged massive stable particle (CHAMP for friends), however, is harder to buy. An electrically-charged particle does not go unseen for long: its electromagnetic interaction is liable to betray it easily. However, there is no need to require that a CHAMP is by force THE reason of missing mass in the universe. These particles could be rare, or even non-existent in the Universe today, and in that case our only chance to see them would be in hadron-collision experiments, where we could produce them if the energy and collision rate are sufficient.

What would happen in the event of a creation of a CHAMP in a hadron collision is that the particle would slowly traverse the detector, leaving a ionization trail. A weak-interacting CHAMP (and to some extent even a strongly-interacting one) would not interact strongly with the heavy layers of iron and lead making up the calorimeter systems of which collider experiments are equipped, and so it would be able to punch through, leaving a signal in the muon chambers before drifting away. What we could see, if we looked carefully, would be a muon track which ionizes the gas much more than muons usually do -because massive CHAMPS are heavy, and so they kick atoms around as they traverse the gas. Also, the low velocity of the particle (be it clear, here “low” means “only few tenths of the speed of light”!) would manifest itself in a delay in the detector signals as the particle traverses them in succession.

CDF has searched for such evidence in its data, by selecting muon candidates and determining whether their crossing time and ionization is compatible with muon tracks or not. More specifically, by directly measuring the time needed for the track to cross the 1.5 meter-radius of the inner tracker, and the particle momentum, the mass of the particle can be inferred. That is easier said than done, however: a muon takes about 5 nanoseconds to traverse the 1.5 meters of the tracker, and to discern a particle moving half that fast, one is requred to measure this time interval with a resolution better than a couple of nanoseconds.

The CDF Time-Of-Flight system (TOF) is capable of doing that. One just needs to determine the production time with enough precision, and then the scintillation bars which are mounted just outside of the tracking chamber (the COT, for central outer tracker) will measure the time delay. The problem with this technique, however, is that the time resolution has a distinctly non-Gaussian behaviour, which may introduce large backgrounds when one selects tracks compatible with a long travel time. The redundancy of CDF comes to the rescue: one can measure the travel time of the particles through the tracker by looking at the residuals of the track fit. Let me explain.

A charged particle crossing the COT leaves a ionization trail. These ions are detected by 96 planes of sense wires along the path, and from the pattern of hit wires the trajectory can be reconstructed. However, each wire will have recorded the released charge at a different time, because they are located at different distances from the track, and the ions take some time to drift in the electric field before their signal is collected. The hit time is used in the fit that determines the particle trajectory: residuals of these time measurements after the track is fit provide a measurement of the particle velocity. In fact, a particle moving slowly creates ionization signals that are progressively delayed as a function of radius; these residuals can be used to determine the travel time.

The resulting measurement has a three-times-worse precision than that coming from the dedicated TOF system (fortunately, I would say, otherwise the TOF itself would be a rather useless tool); however, the uncertainty on this latter measurement has a much more Gaussian behaviour! This is an important asset, since by requiring that the two time measurements are consistent with one another, one can effectively remove the non-Gaussian behavior of the TOF measurement.

By combining crossing time -i.e. velocity- and track momentum measurement, one may then derive a mass estimate for the particle. The distribution of reconstructed masses for CHAMP candidates is shown in the graph below. Overimposed to the data, the distribution expected for a 220-GeV CHAMP signal has been overlaid. It is clear to see that the mass resolution provided by the method is rather poor: despite of that, a high-mass charged particle would be easy to spot if it were there.

One note of warning about this graph: the distribution above shows masses ranging all the way from 0 to 100 GeV, but that does not mean that these tracks have similar masses: the vast majority of tracks are real muons, for which the velocity is underestimated due to instrumental effects: in a sense, the very shape of the curve describes the resolution of the time measurement provided by the analysis.

The absence of tracks compatible with a mass larger than 120 GeV in the data allows to place model-independent limits on the CHAMP mass. Weak-interacting CHAMPS are excluded, in the kinematic region $|\eta|<0.7$ covered by the muon chambers, and with $P_T>40 GeV$, if they are produced with a cross section larger than 10 fb. For strongly-interacting CHAMPS the search considers the case of a scalar top R-hadron, a particle which is predicted by Supersymmetric theories when the stable stop quark binds together with an ordinary quark. In that case, the 95% CL limit can be set at a mass of 249 GeV.

It is interesting to note that this analysis, while not using the magnitude of the ionization left by the track in the gas chamber (the so-called $dE/dx$ on which most past searches of CHAMPS have been based, e.g. in CDF (Run I) and ALEPH) to identify the CHAMP signal candidates, still does use the $dE/dx$ to infer the (background) particle species when determining the resolution of the time measurement from COT residuals. So the measurement shows once more how collider detectors really benefit from the high redundancy of their design!

[Post scriptum: I discuss in simple terms the ionization energy loss in the second half of this recent post.]

It only remains to congratulate with the main authors of this search, Thomas Phillips (from Duke University) and Rick Snider (Fermilab), for their nice result, which is being sent for publication as we speak. The public web page of the analysis, which contains more plots and an abstract, can be browsed here.

## Comments

1. onymous - January 12, 2009

Any idea why a limit for stop is quoted but not for stau? Staus are likely CHAMPs in a wide variety of models….

2. onymous - January 12, 2009

(Rough estimate: 10 fb xsec for staus translates to a limit of around 100 GeV on the mass, which is a bit better than LEP did.)

3. dorigo - January 12, 2009

Yep ominous. No explicit limits on staus, but my guess is it does not improve the 99.5 GeV of LEP combined. The 10 fb is a limit for weak CHAMPs with some acceptance cuts applied, so the limit is a bit weaker than that overall.

Cheers,
T.

4. ervin - January 12, 2009

Tommaso,

Can you please elaborate on the implications (if any) of this finding for current theories regarding the CDF anomaly? Specifically, how does the search for CHAMPS affect models that explain multi-muon events starting from various Dark Matter candidates?

Thank you.

Ervin

5. Andrea Giammanco - January 12, 2009

> It is interesting to note that this analysis, while not using the magnitude of the ionization left by the track in the gas chamber (the so-called dE/dx on which most past searches of CHAMPS have been based, e.g. in CDF (Run I) and ALEPH), does use the dE/dx to infer the particle species when determining the resolution of the time measurement from COT residuals.

Do you mean that the dE/dx in the CDF tracking system is able to discriminate SM particles between them in some kinematical regime, but this ability is of no use in the search for CHAMPs?
Probably I misunderstood, can you clarify better how dE/dx is used in this analysis?
(I’ve already had a quick look at the webpage and at the note linked there.)

6. dorigo - January 13, 2009

Hi Ervin,

I have no idea on the implications for the multi-muon interpretations… As you know, there are a few, but they are not very clear nor do they make very specific predictions. The authors have their own model, which implies the cascade of several bodies which are long-lived in the sense that they have a lifetime of about 20 picoseconds. These particles are however neutral.
It seems to me that these limits can well coexist with a neutral higgs boson which produces some cascade to hidden valley particles.

Andrea, yes, the CDF COT does measure dE/dx rather well and it discriminates protons from deuterons, for instance. With the latter, the method of determining residuals from the track fit has been tuned and verified. That is, they select deuterons with the dE/dx, and then, by knowing the mass of the particle, they can verify that the residuals are consistent with the velocity they infer from the momentum measurement for deuterons.

The search does not make use of dE/dx other than that (contrarily to what was done in Run I, see Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 131801 (2003)), although I think it could well do it. I am not sure whether avoiding dE/dx info one retains more model-independence.

Cheers,
T.

7. Andrea Giammanco - January 13, 2009

Thanks a lot for the clarification.
I should probably explain why I am interested in that: I’m involved in the set-up of such a search in CMS, specifically working on the dE/dx side, and as far as I know the dE/dx by ionization has no significant model dependence (while, of course, the energy deposit in the calorimeters is totally model dependent – indeed it would provide a wonderful way to discriminate between lepton-like and hadron-like CHAMPs in case of discovery).
My guess: maybe the TOF subgroup in CDF finished its analysis before the dE/dx subgroup, and when both will have completely validated their respective methods they will come up with a combined note? (A bidimensional plot of TOF versus dE/dx would be the ultimate smoking gun for a discovery – or for killing a claim of discovery coming from only one of the two methods – since the betas inferred from the two variables are uncorrelated or even have opposite behaviours for the main backgrounds.)

8. dorigo - January 13, 2009

Hi Andrea,

well, the dE/dx by ionization of a stau or a stop R-hadron does depend only on the charge, velocity, and the mass of the particle, so in principle there is model independence even if one uses that. For a fractionary charge things would be different… But I doubt anybody is interested in such a scenario.

I believe that the reason dE/dx was not used is really due to the fact that the combination of timing measurements has smaller backgrounds -the one in the paper is indeed a novel technique for CDF. As for “TOF subgroup” and “dE/dx subgroup”, CDF does not work that way. There is shortage of manpower these days, and I doubt there will be another search for CHAMPS in the same data. Maybe a future one with 3,4, 5 /fb will revert to using the dE/dx, but I doubt that too -much more likely that the same authors will repeat the present analysis with the larger dataset.

Cheers,
T.

9. Daniel de França MTd2 - January 14, 2009

Hi Tommaso,

any gossip about the anomalous multi muon on D0?

Cheers,
Daniel

dorigo - January 14, 2009

Not anything that I know of, but somebody said they’re working at it, and I also know that D0 might (just might) have a slot to talk about their own results on this matter at La Thuile (or was it Moriond ?).

Cheers,
T.

10. Daniel de França MTd2 - January 15, 2009

La Thuile, Aosta Valley, Italy
March 1-7, 2009: http://www.pi.infn.it/lathuile/lathuile_2009.html

44th Rencontres de Moriond
La Thuile (Val d’Aosta, Italy)
February 1 – 8, 2009 http://moriond.in2p3.fr/J09/

It seems that Moriond is more oriented to sky surveys…

11. Philipum - January 15, 2009

Hi Dorigo,

Do you know when we expect these results to appear as a journal publication ? I am working on a stable stop analysis in ATLAS and often quote the limits from the Tevatron.

best,
Philippe

12. dorigo - January 15, 2009

Yes Daniel, prolly it was La Thuile after all.

Philipum, yes, we are done with the paper review, and I think it will be sent to publication very soon. I will add a pointer here when it comes out (if I don’t forget)
Cheers,
T.

13. Philipum - January 15, 2009

Thanks !

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