Testing Gaugino Mass Unification Directly at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to test gaugino mass unification at the LHC, focusing on the mirage pattern, and demonstrates its effectiveness in detecting non-universality with limited data.

Contribution

It introduces a quasi-model independent statistical approach to identify gaugino mass non-universality without reconstructing individual masses.

Findings

Approximately 80% of the parameter space can be tested for non-universality.

The method can detect non-universality at 10% level with about 10 fb^-1 of data.

The approach does not require full mass eigenvalue reconstruction.

Abstract

We report on the first step of a systematic study of how gaugino mass unification can be probed at the LHC in a quasi-model independent manner. Here we focus our attention on the theoretically well-motivated mirage pattern of gaugino masses, a one-parameter family of models of which universal (high scale) gaugino masses are a limiting case. Using a statistical method to optimize our signature selection we arrive at three ensembles of observables targeted at the physics of the gaugino sector, allowing for a determination of this non-universality parameter without reconstructing individual mass eigenvalues or the soft supersymmetry-breaking gaugino masses themselves. In this controlled environment we find that approximately 80% of the supersymmetric parameter space would give rise to a model for which our method will detect non-universality in the gaugino mass sector at the 10% level with approximately 10 inverse femptobarns of integrated luminosity.