Trilepton production at the CERN LHC: SUSY Signals and Standard Model Backgrounds

TL;DR

This paper investigates the sources of isolated trilepton events at the LHC, highlighting heavy flavor decays as significant backgrounds and proposing new cuts to distinguish SUSY signals from Standard Model processes.

Contribution

It demonstrates that heavy flavor decays can dominate trilepton backgrounds and introduces new selection cuts to improve SUSY signal detection.

Findings

Heavy flavor decays produce isolated leptons that can overshadow other SM backgrounds.

Proposed cuts effectively reduce heavy flavor backgrounds in SUSY searches.

Heavy flavor contributions are significant in trilepton final states at the LHC.

Abstract

Events with isolated leptons and missing energy in the final state are known to be signatures of new physics phenomena at high energy collider physics facilities. Standard model (SM) sources of isolated trilepton final states include gauge boson pair production such as WZ and W gamma^{*}, and t-bar t production. Symbol gamma^* represents a virtual photon. Our new contribution is the demonstration that bottom and charm meson decays, b to l X and c to l X$, produce isolated lepton (l) events that can overwhelm the effects of other processes. We compute contributions from a wide range of SM heavy flavor processes. In all these cases, one or more of the final observed isolated leptons comes from a heavy flavor decay. We propose new cuts to control the heavy flavor backgrounds in the specific case of chargino plus neutralino pair production in supersymmetric models.