Hidden SUSY at the LHC: the light higgsino-world scenario and the role of a lepton collider

TL;DR

The paper discusses a higgsino-world SUSY scenario where nearly degenerate light higgsino-like particles evade standard LHC searches but can be detected at future lepton colliders, with implications for dark matter detection.

Contribution

It highlights the challenges of detecting higgsino-like particles at the LHC and advocates for low p_T lepton searches and future collider prospects for discovery.

Findings

Higgsino-like neutralinos and charginos are nearly mass degenerate.

Standard LHC SUSY searches may miss this scenario due to soft decay products.

Future lepton colliders can easily detect these particles.

Abstract

While the SUSY flavor, CP and gravitino problems seem to favor a very heavy spectrum of matter scalars, fine-tuning in the electroweak sector prefers low values of superpotential mass \mu. In the limit of low \mu, the two lightest neutralinos and light chargino are higgsino-like. The light charginos and neutralinos may have large production cross sections at LHC, but since they are nearly mass degenerate, there is only small energy release in three-body sparticle decays. Possible dilepton and trilepton signatures are difficult to observe after mild cuts due to the very soft p_T spectrum of the final state isolated leptons. Thus, the higgsino-world scenario can easily elude standard SUSY searches at the LHC. It should motivate experimental searches to focus on dimuon and trimuon production at the very lowest p_T(\mu) values possible. If the neutralino relic abundance is enhanced via non-standard cosmological dark matter production, then there exist excellent prospects for direct or indirect detection of higgsino-like WIMPs. While the higgsino-world scenario may easily hide from LHC SUSY searches, a linear e^+e^- collider or a muon collider operating in the \sqrt{s}\sim 0.5-1 TeV range would be able to easily access the chargino and neutralino pair production reactions.