Revealing Compressed Stops Using High-Momentum Recoils

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel search strategy for supersymmetric top quarks at the LHC that uses high-momentum recoils to improve sensitivity in challenging low-mass regions, potentially closing existing gaps in coverage.

Contribution

The study demonstrates a new method leveraging large recoil energies to detect stops in previously unconstrained mass regions, enhancing search sensitivity.

Findings

Achieves S/B ratio around 1 in difficult regions

Potential to extend exclusion limits from 550 GeV down to below 200 GeV

Significantly improves coverage of the stop mass plane near the top mass

Abstract

Searches for supersymmetric top quarks at the LHC have been making great progress in pushing sensitivity out to higher mass, but are famously plagued by gaps in coverage around lower-mass regions where the decay phase space is closing off. Within the common stop-NLSP / neutralino-LSP simplified model, the line in the mass plane where there is just enough phase space to produce an on-shell top quark remains almost completely unconstrained. Here, we show that is possible to define searches capable of probing a large patch of this difficult region, with S/B ~ 1 and significances often well beyond 5 sigma. The basic strategy is to leverage the large energy gain of LHC Run 2, leading to a sizable population of stop pair events recoiling against a hard jet. The recoil not only re-establishes a MET signature, but also leads to a distinctive anti-correlation between the MET and the recoil jet transverse vectors when the stops decay all-hadronically. Accounting for jet combinatorics, backgrounds, and imperfections in MET measurements, we estimate that Run 2 will already start to close the gap in exclusion sensitivity with the first few 10s of inverse-fb. By 300/fb, exclusion sensitivity may extend from stop masses of 550 GeV on the high side down to below 200 GeV on the low side, approaching the "stealth" point at m(stop) = m(top) and potentially overlapping with limits from top pair cross section and spin correlation measurements.