Cornering electroweakinos at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper proposes new search strategies for detecting electroweakinos with small mass gaps at the LHC, focusing on three-lepton plus missing energy signals and utilizing novel kinematic variables to improve sensitivity.

Contribution

It introduces innovative kinematic and angular variables, along with analysis techniques, to enhance the detection prospects of compressed electroweakino spectra at the LHC.

Findings

Proposes new variables to improve electroweakino detection sensitivity.

Estimates reach of 320-700 GeV for gaugino masses with 300/fb data.

Highlights challenges for mass gaps below 12 GeV.

Abstract

Squeezed supersymmetric spectra are challenging for the LHC searches based on a sizable missing energy and hard visible particles. One such scenario consists of chargino/second-lightest neutralino NLSPs and a lightest neutralino LSP with a relatively small mass gap (10-50GeV). In this note, we explore search strategies to better probe this parameter space. We focus on the three-lepton plus missing energy channel arising from the chargino/second-lightest neutralino associated production, and we investigate the role of a relatively hard initial state radiation (ISR) jet. In addition to typical kinematic variables, such as the minimum lepton pair invariant mass, we propose an angular separation variable and two ratio variables which capitalize on the main kinematic features; leptons stay relatively soft under the boost from ISR and a sizable missing energy arises only in tight correlation with the ISR boost. With 300/fb of data at the 14 TeV LHC, we expect to probe electroweakinos up to 320 (700) GeV with 30GeV mass-gap and up to 220 (620) GeV with 20GeV mass-gap if gauginos decay via gauge bosons (light sleptons). We emphasize that the three-lepton channel is technically challenging for mass-gap below 12GeV.