Where the Sidewalk Ends: Jets and Missing Energy Search Strategies for the 7 TeV LHC

TL;DR

This paper analyzes search strategies for new colored particles at the 7 TeV LHC, emphasizing the importance of multiregion approaches to avoid missing unexpected signals across diverse event topologies.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive multiregion search strategy and benchmark models to effectively cover various signatures of new physics at the LHC.

Findings

Multiregion searches can cover all kinematic possibilities.

Designing searches around specific phase space regions risks missing signals.

Benchmark models demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Abstract

This work explores the potential reach of the 7 TeV LHC to new colored states in the context of simplified models and addresses the issue of which search regions are necessary to cover an extensive set of event topologies and kinematic regimes. This article demonstrates that if searches are designed to focus on specific regions of phase space, then new physics may be missed if it lies in unexpected corners. Simple multiregion search strategies can be designed to cover all of kinematic possibilities. A set of benchmark models are created that cover the qualitatively different signatures and a benchmark multiregion search strategy is presented that covers these models.