  We show that heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide a promising environment
to search for signatures with displaced vertices in well-motivated New Physics
scenarios. Compared to proton collisions, they offer several advantages, i) the
number of parton level interactions per collision is larger, ii) there is no
pile-up, iii) the lower instantaneous luminosity compared to proton collisions
allows to operate the LHC experiments with very loose triggers, and iv) there
are new production mechanisms that are absent in proton collisions. In the
present work we focus on the third point and show that the modification of the
triggers alone can increase the number of observable events by orders of
magnitude if the long lived particles are predominantly produced with low
transverse momentum. Our results show that collisions of ions lighter than lead
are well-motivated from the viewpoint of searches for New Physics. We
illustrate this for the example of heavy neutrinos in the Neutrino Minimal
Standard Model.
