Long-Lived Dark Hadrons at the Electron-Ion Collider

Abstract

We study a dark non-Abelian gauge sector with GeV-scale confinement. The dark sector is assumed to couple only feebly to the Standard Model, while its low-energy spectrum may contain long-lived flavor-diagonal dark pions. Signals of these states are particularly well suited to the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), where the absence of a hard trigger requirement and the capability to record soft final-state particles offer a complementary probe of dark hadronization dynamics. We present a benchmark portal construction, discuss the mixing between an axion-like mediator and dark pions, and identify the resulting displaced-decay signature.