What started as the main analysis and thesis topic for my last PhD student at LMU Munich in 2018 finally reached a major milestone this week.
Yesterday, the ATLAS Collaboration published our preprint on the arXiv titled ‘Search for soft unclustered energy patterns containing muons in the final state in pp collisions at s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector1.
Given that most of the four-person analysis team only worked on the analysis part-time for most of the time, and I only worked on it in my spare time after starting at Munich Quantum Valley in 2022, it took us a couple more years to complete all the cross-checks and overcome the challenges of what is truly a search for an exotic and unconventional signature (as the respective analysis groups are called within ATLAS).
If you are interested in Hidden Valley / Hidden Sector extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics with a strongly interacting QCD-like hidden force .. or if that’s all just gibberish and you’re just curious, then have a look ;)
Thanks a lot to Alex (my former student), Ligang and Simone as well as everyone within ATLAS that supported us and the analysis over the years!