Searching for the layered structure of space at the LHC

Abstract

Alignment of the main energy fluxes along a straight line in a target plane has been observed in families of cosmic ray particles detected in the Pamir mountains. The fraction of events with alignment is statistically significant for families with superhigh energies and large numbers of hadrons. This can be interpreted as evidence for coplanar hard scattering of secondary hadrons produced in the early stages of the atmospheric cascade development. This phenomenon can be described within the recently proposed ``crystal world,'' with latticized and anisotropic spatial dimensions. Planar events are expected to dominate particle collisions at a hard-scattering energy exceeding the scale ${\ensuremath{\Lambda}}_{3}$ at which space transitions from $3\mathrm{D}\ensuremath{\rightleftharpoons}2\mathrm{D}$. We study specific collider signatures that will test this hypothesis. We show that the energy spectrum of Drell-Yan (DY) scattering is significantly modified in this framework. At the LHC, two jet and three jet events are necessarily planar, but four jet events can test the hypothesis. Accordingly, we study in a model-independent way the $5\ensuremath{\sigma}$ discovery reach of the ATLAS and CMS experiments for identifying four jets coplanarities. For the extreme scenario in which all $pp\ensuremath{\rightarrow}4$ jet scattering processes become coplanar above ${\ensuremath{\Lambda}}_{3}$, we show that with an integrated luminosity of $10(100)\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{fb}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ the LHC experiments have the potential to discover correlations between jets if ${\ensuremath{\Lambda}}_{3}\ensuremath{\lesssim}1.25(1.6)\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{TeV}$.