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arXiv · 2609.04386

Earth-scale searches for displaced vertices: KM3NeT meets the LHC

Ui Min·Wen Yin
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Abstract

At high-energy colliders, enormous numbers of feebly interacting particles beyond the Standard Model can be produced with negligible missing-energy signatures in the main detectors. These particles can travel macroscopic distances and decay inside a distant large-volume detector, leaving visible signals. In this sense, we may not need new detectors to search for very long-lived particles. In this paper, we show that long-lived dark particles produced in rare meson decays in proton-proton collisions during LHC Run 3 and at the HL-LHC can leave observable imprints in KM3NeT detectors such as ORCA. If no anomalous signal has been observed in ORCA to date, our projected sensitivity for LHC Run 3 will correspond to one of the strongest limits on kaon decays into light long-lived particles.

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Ui Min, Wen Yin. 2026-09-03. Earth-scale searches for displaced vertices: KM3NeT meets the LHC. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04386

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