Search for soft unclustered energy patterns containing muons in the final state in $pp$ collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Soft unclustered energy patterns (SUEPs) refer to high-multiplicity, isotropic distributions of low-momentum particles that could arise in strongly-coupled hidden sector theories. A search for SUEPs whose decay products contain muons in the final state is presented using 140 fb⁻¹ of proton-proton collision data at √s = 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider during 2015-2018. The analysis targets SUEP signatures via gluon-gluon fusion production of a scalar mediator in Hidden Valley scenarios. No significant excess over the Standard Model expectation is observed. Exclusion limits are set on the product of the mediator production cross section and the branching fraction for its decay into a SUEP, down to 0.05 fb for a mediator mass of mS = 750 GeV, 0.4 fb for mS = 400 GeV, and 70 fb for mS = 125 GeV; the last value, when identifying the mediator with the Standard Model Higgs boson, translates to an upper limit on the branching fraction of around 0.2%.