Mirage Models Confront the LHC: III. Deflected Mirage Mediation

TL;DR

This paper investigates deflected mirage mediation, a string-inspired supersymmetry breaking scenario, updating constraints from LHC data and dark matter experiments, and exploring its discovery potential with compressed spectra and collider-detector correlations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of deflected mirage mediation models, incorporating recent experimental data and highlighting their distinctive phenomenological features.

Findings

Lower superpartner masses are possible in DMM compared to pure mirage models.

Compressed spectra pose experimental challenges for detection.

Correlations between LHC accessibility and dark matter detection prospects are identified.

Abstract

We complete the study of a class of string-motivated effective supergravity theories in which modulus-induced soft supersymmetry breaking is sufficiently suppressed in the observable sector so as to be competitive with anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking. Here we consider deflected mirage mediation (DMM), where contributions from gauge mediation are added to those arising from gravity mediation and anomaly mediation. We update previous work that surveyed the rich parameter space of such theories, in light of data from the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and recent dark matter detection experiments. Constraints arising from LHC superpartner searches at $\sqrt{s} = 8\,{\rm TeV}$ are considered, and discovery prospects at $\sqrt{s} = 14\,{\rm TeV}$ are evaluated. We find that deflected mirage mediation generally allows for SU(3)-charged superpartners of significantly lower mass (given current knowledge of the Higgs mass and neutralino relic density) than was found for the `pure' mirage mediation models of Kachru et al. Consequently, discovery prospects are enhanced for many combinations of matter multiplet modular weights. We examine the experimental challenges that will arise due to the prospect of highly compressed spectra in DMM, and the correlation between accessibility at the LHC and discovery prospects at large-scale liquid xenon dark matter detectors.