Hitting sbottom in natural SUSY

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of sbottom searches at the LHC to indirectly constrain natural SUSY scenarios, emphasizing that sbottom detection could be a promising pathway to discovering or ruling out natural SUSY within the TeV scale.

Contribution

It highlights the importance of sbottom searches as a less challenging and scalable method to probe natural SUSY, and discusses the interplay with custodial symmetry violation for constraining stops.

Findings

Sbottom searches can effectively constrain natural SUSY parameter space.

Improved b-tagging algorithms enhance sbottom detection prospects.

A lack of natural SUSY signals at the LHC suggests such spectra may not exist within reach.

Abstract

We compare the experimental prospects of direct stop and sbottom pair production searches at the LHC. Such searches for stops are of great interest as they directly probe for states that are motivated by the SUSY solution to the hierarchy problem of the Higgs mass parameter - leading to a "Natural" SUSY spectrum. Noting that sbottom searches are less experimentally challenging and scale up in reach directly with the improvement on b-tagging algorithms, we discuss the interplay of small TeV scale custodial symmetry violation with sbottom direct pair production searches as a path to obtaining strong sub-TeV constraints on stops in a natural SUSY scenario. We argue that if a weak scale natural SUSY spectrum does not exist within the reach of LHC, then hopes for such a spectrum for large regions of parameter space should sbottom out. Conversely, the same arguments make clear that a discovery of such a spectrum is likely to proceed in a sbottom up manner.