David Milstead

The European Spallation Source will open a new discovery window in particle physics. HIBEAM/NNBAR is a proposed two-stage program of experiments that can exploit this remarkable opportunity. The program starts with a general-purpose magnetically controlled beamline (HIBEAM) which, among other topics, enables the first competitive search for over thirty years of free neutrons converting to antineutrons, giving an order of magnitude increase in sensitivity, and the world’s most sensitive laboratory-based search for ultralight axion-like particles coupling to nucleons. The second stage (NNBAR) is a dedicated search for free neutrons converting to anti-neutrons using a greater neutron flux and a longer beamline than at HIBEAM. NNBAR provides a sensitivity increase of three orders of magnitude compared to the last search. This paper summarises the design and potential of the HIBEAM/NNBAR program.

The goal of the HIBEAM/NNBAR program is to search for baryon number violation via the conversion or oscillation of neutrons into sterile neutrons and/or antineutrons at the European Spallation Source. A key experimental component of the program is the construction of an annihilation detector to directly observe the production of an antineutron following the oscillation. Design studies for the annihilation detector are presented. The predicted response of the detector models are studied using Geant4 simulations made with Monte Carlo simulations of the annihilation signal topology and cosmic ray backgrounds. Particle identification and sensitive discriminating observables, such as invariant mass and sphericity, are shown.

Particles beyond the Standard Model (SM) can generically have lifetimes that are long compared to SM particles at the weak scale. When produced at experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, these long-lived particles (LLPs) can decay far from the interaction vertex of the primary proton–proton collision. Such LLP signatures are distinct from those of promptly decaying particles that are targeted by the majority of searches for new physics at the LHC, often requiring customized techniques to identify, for example, significantly displaced decay vertices, tracks with atypical properties, and short track segments. Given their non-standard nature, a comprehensive overview of LLP signatures at the LHC is beneficial to ensure that possible avenues of the discovery of new physics are not overlooked. Here we report on the joint work of a community of theorists and experimentalists with the ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments—as well as those working on dedicated experiments such as MoEDAL, milliQan, MATHUSLA, CODEX-b, and FASER—to survey the current state of LLP searches at the LHC, and to chart a path for the development of LLP searches into the future, both in the upcoming Run 3 and at the high-luminosity LHC. The work is organized around the current and future potential capabilities of LHC experiments to generally discover new LLPs, and takes a signature-based approach to surveying classes of models that give rise to LLPs rather than emphasizing any particular theory motivation. We develop a set of simplified models; assess the coverage of current searches; document known, often unexpected backgrounds; explore the capabilities of proposed detector upgrades; provide recommendations for the presentation of search results; and look towards the newest frontiers, namely high-multiplicity ‘dark showers’, highlighting opportunities for expanding the LHC reach for these signals.

We summarize the current status of baryon number violation in supersymmetry and provide prospects for going beyond the present reach by means of a new search for neutron-antineutron oscillations. The main motivation is the recently proposed neutron-antineutron oscillation experiment at the European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden, which is projected to be able to improve the current bound on the transition probability in the quasi-free regime by three orders of magnitude. We consider various processes involving superpartners that give rise to neutron-antineutron oscillations and extract the corresponding simplified models, including only the most relevant superpartners and couplings. In terms of these models we recast and determine the exclusion limits from LHC searches as well as from searches for flavor transitions, CP violation and di-nucleon decays. We find that, for certain regions of the parameter space, the proposed neutron-antineutron experiment has a reach that goes beyond all other experiments, as it can probe gluino and squark masses in the multi-TeV range.