How to look for supersymmetry under the lamppost at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper conducts a comprehensive, model-independent analysis of supersymmetry signatures at the LHC, identifying unique multilepton events that could enable early discovery of SUSY with minimal background.

Contribution

It systematically explores all mass hierarchies of supersymmetric particles to identify novel, high-multiplicity lepton signatures that have not been previously studied.

Findings

Discovery potential of up to 8 leptons in final states.

Identification of background-free, spectacular signatures.

Possibility of early SUSY detection at 7 TeV with low luminosity.

Abstract

We apply a model-independent, agnostic approach to the collider phenomenology of supersymmetry (SUSY), in which all mass parameters are taken as free inputs at the weak scale. We consider the gauginos, higgsinos, and the first two generations of sleptons and squarks, and analyze all possible mass hierarchies among them ($4\times 8!=161,280$ in total) in which the lightest superpartner is neutral, leading to missing energy. In each case, we identify the full set of the dominant (i.e. least suppressed by phase space, small mixing angles or Yukawa couplings) decay chains originating from the lightest colored superpartner. Our exhaustive search reveals several quite dramatic yet unexplored multilepton signatures with up to 8 isolated leptons (plus possibly up to 2 massive gauge or Higgs bosons) in the final state. Such events are spectacular, background-free for all practical purposes, and may lead to a discovery of SUSY in the very early stage ($\sim 10\ {\rm pb}^{-1}$) of LHC operations at 7 TeV.