Probing the flavor violating scalar top quark signal at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper assesses the potential to detect flavor-violating scalar top quark decays at the LHC, focusing on challenging scenarios with small mass differences, and explores strategies like charm jet tagging to improve sensitivity.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the prospects for observing the $ ilde{t}_1 o c ilde{ au}_1^0$ decay mode at 8 and 13 TeV, including background reduction techniques and sensitivity estimates.

Findings

At 8 TeV, detection prospects are limited due to low cross sections and luminosity.

At 13 TeV with 100 fb^{-1}, top squarks up to 450 GeV can be probed.

Charm jet tagging can significantly enhance the search sensitivity.

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider(LHC) has completed its run at 8 TeV with the experiments ATLAS and CMS having collected about 25 $\rm fb^{-1}$ of data each. Discovery of a light Higgs boson, coupled with lack of evidence for supersymmetry at the LHC so far, has motivated studies of supersymmetry in the context of naturalness with the principal focus being the third generation squarks. In this work, we analyze the prospects of the flavor violating decay mode $\rm \tilde{t}_1\to c\chi_{1}^{0}$ at 8 and 13 TeV center of mass energy at the LHC. This channel is also relevant in the dark matter context for the stop-coannihilation scenario, where the relic density depends on the mass difference between the lighter stop quark ($\tilde{t}_1$) and the lightest neutralino($\chi_{1}^{0}$) states. This channel is extremely challenging to probe, specially for situations when the mass difference between the lighter stop quark and the lightest neutralino is small. Using certain kinematical properties of signal events we find that the level of backgrounds can be reduced substantially. We find that the prospect for this channel is limited due to the low production cross section for top squarks and limited luminosity at 8 TeV, but at the 13 TeV LHC with 100 $fb^{-1}$ luminosity, it is possible to probe top squarks with masses up to $\sim$ 450 GeV. We also discuss how the sensitivity could be significantly improved by tagging charm jets.