Constraining portals with displaced Higgs decay searches at the LHC

Abstract

It is very easy to write down models in which long-lived particles decaying to standard model states are pair-produced via Higgs decays, resulting in the signature of approximately back-to-back pairs of displaced narrow hadronic jets and/or lepton jets at the LHC. The LHC collaborations have already searched for such signatures with no observed excess. This paper describes a Monte Carlo method to reinterpret the searches. The method relies on (ideally multidimensional) efficiency tables, thus we implore collaborations to include them in any future work. Exclusion regions in mixing-mass parameter space are presented which constrain portal models.

Comments: 19 pages, 4 figures. [v2] This version accepted for publication in JHEP: some important clarifications made, plot schemes updated for ease of reading, new experimental results included, and a handful of minor additions and alterations