Extending the Reach of Compressed Gluinos at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper develops a specialized search strategy for compressed gluino-bino spectra at the LHC, extending discovery reach by exploiting unique kinematic features and soft trigger considerations.

Contribution

It introduces a new kinematic variable tailored for compressed spectra and demonstrates its effectiveness in extending the LHC discovery reach for gluinos.

Findings

Discovery reach extends to 850 GeV at 8 TeV and 1370 GeV at 13 TeV for gluino masses.

A new kinematic variable improves detection sensitivity in compressed regions.

Soft trigger strategies are crucial for probing compressed supersymmetric spectra.

Abstract

Conventional supersymmetry searches rely on large missing momentum and, on that account, are unsuitable for discovering superpartners nearly degenerate with the LSP. Such "compressed regions" are best probed by dedicated strategies that exploit their unique kinematic features. We consider a case study of a compressed gluino-bino simplified spectrum, motivated by its ability to set the dark matter relic abundance via co-annihilation. A kinematic variable suited to this spectrum is introduced, by which, for a gluino-bino mass splitting of 100 GeV, the discovery reach is extendable to m(gluino) = 850 GeV (1370 GeV) at LHC center-of-mass energy 8 TeV (13 TeV) with luminosity 20 inverse fb (3000 inverse fb). The non-trivial role played by soft triggers is also discussed.