Search for millicharged particles in proton-proton collisions at <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:msqrt><mml:mi>s</mml:mi></mml:msqrt><mml:mo>=</mml:mo><mml:mn>13</mml:mn><mml:mtext> </mml:mtext><mml:mtext> </mml:mtext><mml:mi>TeV</mml:mi></mml:math>
A. H. Ball, G. Beauregard, J. J. Brooke, C. Campagnari, Michael Carrigan, Matthew Citron, J. De La Haye, A. De Roeck, Yens Killian Elskens, R. Escobar Franco, M. Ezeldine, Brian Francis, M. Gastal, M. Ghimire, J. Goldstein, F. Golf, J. Guiang, A. Haas, R. Heller, C. Hill, L. Lavezzo, R. Loos, S. Lowette, Gabriel Magill, Brandon J. Manley, B. Marsh, D. W. Miller, B. Odegard, François Saab, Jihad Sahili, R. Schmitz, F. Setti, Harry Shakeshaft, D. Stuart, M. Swiatlowski, J. Yoo, Haitham Zaraket, H. Zheng
Abstract
We report on a search for elementary particles with charges much smaller than the electron charge using a data sample of proton-proton collisions provided by the CERN Large Hadron Collider in 2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $37.5\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{fb}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. A prototype scintillator-based detector is deployed to conduct the first search at a hadron collider sensitive to particles with charges $\ensuremath{\le}0.1e$. The existence of new particles with masses between 20 and 4700 MeV is excluded at 95% confidence level for charges between $0.006e$ and $0.3e$, depending on their mass. New sensitivity is achieved for masses larger than 700 MeV.