Recent Results of Exotic Physics Searches at the CMS Experiment

The LHC has recently completed its Run 3 data taking, marking the transition toward the High-Luminosity LHC era. While searches for physics beyond the Standard Model have already excluded many models at TeV scales, further gains from luminosity alone become increasingly limited. This motivates the development of new experimental and analysis techniques that can access signatures and phase-space regions beyond the reach of conventional searches. This review summarizes recent CMS searches for exotic physics, and then focuses on a selection of analyses that employ particularly novel strategies. These include level-1 trigger data scouting at the full 40 MHz collision rate for heavy long-lived charged particles, dedicated reconstruction techniques for highly collimated lepton pairs in heavy gauge-boson searches, and high-level trigger data scouting for searches for soft unclustered energy patterns, a signature that had not previously been explored at the LHC. These novel techniques reviewed here provide examples of promising directions for future searches during the HL-LHC era.