Tracking down quirks at the Large Hadron Collider

Non-helical tracks are the smoking gun signature of charged and/or colored quirks, which are pairs of particles bound by a new, long-range confining force. We propose a method to efficiently search for these non-helical tracks at the LHC, without the need to fit their trajectories. We show that the hits corresponding to quirky trajectories can be selected efficiently by searching for co-planar hits in the inner layers of the ATLAS and CMS trackers, even in the presence of on average 50 pile-up vertices. We further argue that backgrounds from photon conversions and unassociated pile-up hits can be removed almost entirely, while maintaining a signal reconstruction efficiency as high as 70%. With the 300 fb$^{-1}$ dataset, this implies a discovery potential for string tension between 100 eV and 30 keV, and colored (electroweak charged) quirks as heavy as 1600 (650) GeV may be discovered.