Revealing the footprints of squark gluino production through Higgs search experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at 7 TeV and 14 TeV

TL;DR

This paper investigates how squark-gluino production in GMSB models can distort Higgs decay signals at the LHC, potentially revealing new heavy particles beyond the Standard Model through di-photon invariant mass distributions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that GMSB models can cause observable distortions in Higgs search channels, providing a new method to detect supersymmetric particles at the LHC.

Findings

Distortions in di-photon mass distributions can indicate squark-gluino production.

GMSB models can produce statistically significant excesses early in LHC data.

Effective mass distributions may also reveal heavy particles beyond the Higgs sector.

Abstract

The invariant mass distribution of the di-photons from the decay of the lighter scalar Higgs boson(h) to be carefully measured by dedicated h search experiments at the LHC may be distorted by the di-photons associated with the squark-gluino events with much larger cross sections in Gauge Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking (GMSB) models. This distortion if observed by the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at 7 TeV or 14 TeV, would disfavour not only the standard model but various two Higgs doublet models with comparable h - masses and couplings but without a sector consisting of new heavy particles decaying into photons. The minimal GMSB (mGMSB) model constrained by the mass bound on h from LEP and that on the lightest neutralino from the Tevatron, produce negligible effects. But in the currently popular general GMSB(GGMSB) models the tail of the above distribution may show statistically significant excess of events even in the early stages of the LHC experiments with integrated luminosity insufficient for the discovery of h. We illustrate the above points by introducing several benchmark points in various GMSB models - minimal as well as non-minimal. The same conclusion follows from a detailed parameter scan in a simplified GGMSB model recently employed by the CMS collaboration to interpret their searches in the di-photon + $\etslash$ channel. Other observables like the effective mass distribution of the di-photon + X events may also reveal the presence of new heavy particles beyond the Higgs sector. The contamination of the h mass peak and simple remedies are also discussed.