Centre d'études et d'expertise sur les risques, l'environnement, la mobilité et l'aménagement

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Solutions to the hierarchy problem usually require top partners. In standard SUSY or composite Higgs theories, the partners carry SM color and are becoming increasingly constrained by LHC searches. However, theories like Folded SUSY (FS), Twin Higgs (TH) and Quirky Little Higgs (QLH) introduce uncolored top partners, which can be SM singlets or carry electroweak charge. Their small production cross section left doubt as to whether the LHC can effectively probe such scenarios. Typically, these partners are charged under their own mirror color gauge group. In FS and QLH, the absence of light mirror matter allows glueballs to form at the bottom of the mirror spectrum. This is also the case in some TH realizations. The Higgs can decay to these mirror glueballs, with the glueballs decaying into SM particles with potentially observable lifetimes. We undertake the first detailed study of this glueball signature and quantitatively demonstrate the discovery potential of uncolored naturalness via exotic Higgs decays at the LHC and a potential future 100 TeV collider. Our findings indicate that mirror glueballs are the smoking gun signature of natural FS and QLH type theories, in analogy to tree-level Higgs coupling shifts for the TH. We show that glueball masses in the ∼ 10-60 GeV mass range are theoretically preferred. Careful treatment of lifetime, mirror-hadronization and nonperturbative uncertainties is required to perform meaningful collider studies. We outline several new search strategies for exotic Higgs decays of the form h → XX → 4f at the LHC, with X having lifetimes in the 10µm to km range. We find that FS stops can be probed with masses up to 600 (1100) GeV at the LHC with 300 (3000) fb −1 of data, and TH top partners could be accessible with masses up to 900 (1500) GeV. This makes exotic Higgs decays the prime discovery channel for uncolored naturalness at the LHC.

can be detected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provided the top partners are sufficiently light, and the theory correspondingly natural. In this paper we consider three theories that address the little hierarchy problem and involve colorless top partners, specifically the Mirror Twin Higgs, Folded Supersymmetry, and the Quirky Little Higgs. For each model we investigate the current and future bounds on the top partners, and the corresponding limits on naturalness, that can be obtained from the Higgs program at the LHC. We conclude that the LHC will not be able to strongly disfavor naturalness, with mild tuning at the level of about one part in ten remaining allowed even with 3000 fb −1 of data at 14 TeV.