New Strategies for Discovering Quirks at Colliders

The Standard Model's (SM) incompleteness motivates facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to develop new methods to uncover the fundamental structure of our Universe. New physics, overlooked by current strategies, may be waiting to be discovered at energies already accessible to the LHC. Exploring less studied signals and novel signatures can optimize the LHC's discovery potential. For example, bound states of scalar quirks ("squirks'') may be copiously produced at the LHC. Squirks appear in several motivated extensions of the SM, but current LHC searches are often blind to these states. I outline new search strategies for discovering squirky bound states at the LHC. I detail how the discovery space expands for both electrically charged and electrically neutral bound states by leveraging the glueballs of the force that binds the squirks. These glueballs can have small mixing with the SM Higgs, leading to displaced vertices in collider events. I show how these striking signatures can be leveraged to greatly increase the LHC's potential to discover new particles during its high-luminosity runs.