The Status of GMSB After 1/fb at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper assesses the current status of supersymmetry with General Gauge Mediation at the LHC after 1/fb of data, identifying gaps in search strategies and proposing improvements to enhance discovery potential.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive reinterpretation of LHC searches within GGM, highlighting regions with weak coverage and suggesting optimized search strategies like leptonic $M_{T2}$ for future runs.

Findings

Good overall coverage of GGM parameter space

Significant discovery potential remains at 7 TeV

Identifies weakly constrained regions like electroweak production and third-generation sfermions

Abstract

We thoroughly investigate the current status of supersymmetry in light of the latest searches at the LHC, using General Gauge Mediation (GGM) as a well-motivated signature generator that leads to many different simplified models. We consider all possible promptly-decaying NLSPs in GGM, and by carefully reinterpreting the existing LHC searches, we derive limits on both colored and electroweak SUSY production. Overall, the coverage of GGM parameter space is quite good, but much discovery potential still remains even at 7 TeV. We identify several regions of parameter space where the current searches are the weakest, typically in models with electroweak production, third generation sfermions or squeezed spectra, and we suggest how ATLAS and CMS might modify their search strategies given the understanding of GMSB at 1/fb. In particular, we propose the use of leptonic $M_{T2}$ to suppress $t{\bar t}$ backgrounds. Because we express our results in terms of simplified models, they have broader applicability beyond the GGM framework, and give a global view of the current LHC reach. Our results on 3rd generation squark NLSPs in particular can be viewed as setting direct limits on naturalness.