Reduced LHC constraints for higgsino-like heavier electroweakinos

TL;DR

This paper investigates higgsino-like electroweakinos in the pMSSM, revealing weaker LHC constraints, new dark matter mechanisms, and promising detection prospects, with distinctive collider signatures and implications for future experiments.

Contribution

It introduces the analysis of higgsino-dominated and mixed electroweakino models, highlighting their unique collider signatures, dark matter mechanisms, and experimental constraints compared to wino models.

Findings

LHC constraints are weaker for higgsino models.

Large branching ratios for Higgs decay modes in higgsino models.

Extended models with light gluinos have strong limits from ATLAS data.

Abstract

As a sequel to our earlier work on wino-dominated $\tilde \chi_1^{\pm}$ and $\tilde \chi_2^{0}$ (wino models), we focus on the pMSSM models where $\tilde \chi_1^{\pm}$ and $\tilde \chi_{2,3}^{0}$ are either higgsino dominated (higgsino models) or admixtures of significant amount of higgsino and wino components (mixed models), with or without light sleptons. The LHC constraints in the trilepton channel are significantly weaker even in the presence of light sleptons, especially in the higgsino models, compared to those mostly studied by the LHC collaborations with wino-dominated $\tilde \chi_1^{\pm}$ and $\tilde \chi_2^{0}$. The modes $\tilde \chi_{2,3}^{0}\rightarrow h~\tilde\chi_1^{0}$ with large branching ratios (BRs) are more common in the higgsino models and may produce spectacular signal in the LHC Run-II. In a variety of higgsino and mixed models we have delineated the allowed parameter space due to the LHC constraints, the observed Dark Matter (DM) relic density of the universe, which gets contributions from many novel DM producing mechanisms i.e., the annihilation/coannihilation processes that lead to the correct range of relic density, and the precise measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. In the higgsino models many new DM producing mechanisms, which are not allowed in the wino models, open up. We have also explored the prospects of direct and indirect detection of DM in the context of the LUX and IceCube experiments respectively. In an extended model having only light gluinos in addition to the electroweak sparticles, the gluinos decay into final states with multiple taggable b-jets with very large BRs. As a consequence, the existing ATLAS data in the $0l$ + jets (3b) + $E\!\!\!\!/_T$ channel provide the best limit on $m_{\tilde g}$ ($\approx$ 1.3 TeV). Several novel signatures of higgsino models for LHC Run-II and ILC have been identified.