Search for heavy stable charged particles at the CMS experiment

Abstract

method of searching for Heavy Stable Charged Particles (HSCP) using dE/dx and momentum measurements from the CMS inner tracking system is presented. The shape of the dE/dx distribution is used to distinguish background from signal, in combination with slicing the data into bins of pseudorapidity and number of dE/dx measurements, which together extend and improve on a previous analysis conducted as a counting experiment. In particular, the expected minimum cross section to make a discovery of 5-sigma significance is reduced, and expected upper limits are more restrictive. The data are consistent with the background-only hypothesis and are used to set upper limits on the production cross section as a function of mass for several different HSCP models. The data sample used was collected by the CMS detector in 2011 pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV, corresponding to approximately 5/fb.