Compressed supersymmetry after 1/fb at the Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the Large Hadron Collider's ability to detect supersymmetric models with compressed spectra using early 7 TeV data, highlighting optimized search strategies for such scenarios.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of LHC sensitivity to compressed supersymmetry models with specific jet and missing energy cuts, proposing effective search regions for early data.

Findings

LHC can set meaningful limits on compressed supersymmetry with 1/fb data.

Signal regions with fewer jets and higher missing energy are most effective.

Extreme compression requires specialized analysis strategies.

Abstract

We study the reach of the Large Hadron Collider with 1/fb of data at sqrt{s} = 7 TeV for several classes of supersymmetric models with compressed mass spectra, using jets and missing transverse energy cuts like those employed by ATLAS for Summer 2011 data. In the limit of extreme compression, the best limits come from signal regions that do not require more than 2 or 3 jets and that remove backgrounds by requiring more missing energy rather than higher effective mass.