  A strongly interacting dark sector can give rise to a class of signatures
dubbed dark showers, where in analogy to the strong sector in the Standard
Model, the dark sector undergoes its own showering and hadronization, before
decaying into Standard Model final states. When the typical decay lengths of
the dark sector mesons are larger than a few centimeters (and no larger than a
few meters) they give rise to the striking signature of emerging jets,
characterized by a large multiplicity of displaced vertices. In this article we
consider the general reinterpretation of the CMS search for emerging jets plus
prompt jets into arbitrary new physics scenarios giving rise to emerging jets.
More concretely, we consider the cases where the SM Higgs mediates between the
dark sector and the SM, for several benchmark decay scenarios. Our procedure is
validated employing the same model than the CMS emerging jet search. We find
that emerging jets can be the leading probe in regions of parameter space, in
particular when considering the so-called gluon-portal and dark photon-portal
decay benchmarks. With the current 16.1 fb$^{-1}$ of luminosity this search can
exclude down to ${\cal O} (20) \% $ exotic branching ratio of the SM Higgs, but
a naive extrapolation to the 139 fb$^{-1}$ luminosity employed in the current
model-independent, indirect bound of 16% would probe exotic branching ratios
into dark quarks down to below 10%. Further extrapolating these results to the
HL-LHC, we find that one can pin down exotic branching ratio values of 1%,
which is below the HL-LHC expectations of 2.5$-$4%. We make our recasting code
publicly available, as part of the LLP Recasting Repository.
