Discovering Bottom Squark Co-annihilation at ILC

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of the ILC at 500 GeV to detect a specific dark matter scenario involving bottom squark co-annihilation, which is challenging for the LHC due to low-energy jets.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the ILC can probe the sbottom-neutralino co-annihilation scenario using full detector simulation, overcoming jet energy and flavor tagging challenges.

Findings

ILC can test a large part of the parameter space for this scenario.

Full SiD simulation confirms the feasibility of detecting low-energy jets.

The study highlights the ILC's unique capability compared to the LHC.

Abstract

We study the potential of International Linear Collider (ILC) at sqrt(s) = 500 GeV to probe new dark matter motivated scenario where the bottom squark (sbottom) is the next to lightest supersymmetric particle. For this scenario, which is virtually impossible for the LHC to test, the ILC has a potential to cover a large fraction of the parameter space. The challenge is due to a very low energy of jets, below 20-30 GeV, which pushes the jet clustering and flavour tagging algorithms to their limits. The process of sbottom pair production was studied within the SiD detector concept. We demonstrate that ILC offers a unique opportunity to test the SUSY parameter space motivated by the sbottom neutralino co-annihilation scenario in cases when the sbottom production is kinematically accessible. The study was done with the full SiD simulation and reconstruction chain including all Standard Model and beam backgrounds.