Deconstructed Transverse Mass Variables

TL;DR

This paper introduces deconstructed transverse mass variables that improve the detection of supersymmetric particles with compressed spectra by preserving missing momentum information, extending search capabilities beyond traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes and demonstrates the effectiveness of deconstructed transverse mass variables for supersymmetry searches, especially in challenging compressed spectra scenarios.

Findings

Extends accessible parameter space for SUSY searches beyond traditional methods.

Enables detection of larger neutralino masses relative to stop and top masses.

Facilitates novel searches for single stop production and generic gluino and stop searches.

Abstract

Traditional searches for R-parity conserving natural supersymmetry (SUSY) require large transverse mass and missing energy cuts to separate the signal from large backgrounds. SUSY models with compressed spectra inherently produce signal events with small amounts of missing energy that are hard to explore. We use this difficulty to motivate the construction of "deconstructed" transverse mass variables which are designed preserve information on both the norm and direction of the missing momentum. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these variables in searches for the pair production of supersymmetric top-quark partners which subsequently decay into a final state with an isolated lepton, jets and missing energy. We show that the use of deconstructed transverse mass variables extends the accessible compressed spectra parameter space beyond the region probed by traditional methods. The parameter space can further be expanded to neutralino masses that are larger than the difference between the stop and top masses. In addition, we also discuss how these variables allow for novel searches of single stop production, in order to directly probe unconstrained stealth stops in the small stop- and neutralino-mass regime. We also demonstrate the utility of these variables for generic gluino and stop searches in all-hadronic final states. Overall, we demonstrate that deconstructed transverse variables are essential to any search wanting to maximize signal separation from the background when the signal has undetected particles in the final state.