Prospects of searches for long-lived charged particles with MoEDAL

Abstract

Abstract We study the prospects of searches for exotic long-lived particles with the MoEDAL detector at the LHC, assuming the integrated luminosity of 30 fb$$^{-1}$$ -1 that is expected at the end of Run 3. MoEDAL incorporates nuclear track detectors deployed a few metres away from the interaction point, which are sensitive to any highly-ionizing particles. Hence MoEDAL is able to detect singly- or doubly-charged particles with low velocities $$\beta < 0.15$$ β<0.15 or $$< 0.3$$ <0.3 , respectively, and lifetimes larger than $${{\mathcal {O}}}(1) \,\mathrm{m}/c$$ O(1)m/c . We examine the MoEDAL sensitivity to various singly-charged supersymmetric particles with long lifetimes and to several types of doubly-charged long-lived particles with different spins and SU(2) charges. We compare the prospective MoEDAL mass reaches to current limits from ATLAS and CMS, which involve auxiliary analysis assumptions. MoEDAL searches for doubly-charged fermions are particularly competitive.