Searching for millicharged particles at the LHC (and beyond)

par Juan Salvador Tafoya Vargas (UC Davis)

lundi 13 oct. 2025, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Paris

200/1-101 - Salle 101 (IJCLab)

The search for millicharged particles (mCPs), which naturally arise in many Dark Sector models offering potential Dark Matter candidates, provides a unique opportunity to probe extensions of the Standard Model (SM). 

The MilliQan experiment is an ongoing search for mCPs located just above the CMS experiment at the LHC and leverages this proximity along shielding from most SM backgrounds to gain sensitivity to mCPs in the mass range of 0.01 - 45 GeV, while having sensitivity to charges as low as 0.003e. Similar concepts deployed in different locations provide complementary reach: the FORMOSA detector in the ATLAS forward region enhances sensitivity to low-mass/low-charge mCPs, while the SUBMET experiment at J-PARC extends coverage to the extremely low-charge regime using beam-dump data.

This seminar will present the first MilliQan results, recently published from an integrated luminosity of 127 fb⁻¹ of Run 3 data. It will also highlight recent commissioning studies, projections for the full Run 3 dataset, and the latest status of the FORMOSA and SUBMET searches.

JuanTafoya_Seminar_millicharged_IJCLab.pdf