Signals of supersymmetry with inaccessible first two families at the Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper explores supersymmetry signals at the LHC when only the third family squarks and sleptons are accessible, proposing event selection strategies to distinguish this scenario from others and analyzing potential for detection up to 2 TeV gluino mass.

Contribution

It introduces a method to identify SUSY signals with only third family squarks and sleptons accessible at the LHC, including event selection criteria and analysis techniques.

Findings

Gluino masses up to 2 TeV can be probed at the LHC.

Event rate analysis helps differentiate this scenario from others.

Associated Higgs production provides information on tan beta.

Abstract

We investigate the signals of supersymmetry (SUSY) in a scenario where only the third family squarks and sleptons can be produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in addition to the gluino, charginos and neutralinos. The final states in such cases are marked by a multiplicity of top and/or bottom quarks. We study in particular, the case when the stop, sbottom and gluino masses are near the TeV scale due to which, the final state t's and b's are very energetic. We point out the difficulty in b-tagging and identifying energetic tops and suggest several event selection criteria which allow the signals to remain significantly above the standard model background. We show that such scenarios with gluino mass up to 2 TeV can be successfully probed at the LHC. Information on $\tan \beta$ can also be obtained by looking at associated Higgs production in the cascades of accompanying neutralinos. We also show that a combined analysis of event rates in the different channels and the effective mass distribution allows one to differentiate this scenario from the one where all three sfermion families are accessible.