Prospects for natural SUSY

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the LHC's potential to discover natural supersymmetry by analyzing exclusion bounds and discovery prospects at various energies and luminosities, highlighting the challenges and uncertainties involved.

Contribution

It provides a detailed projection of the LHC's ability to exclude or discover natural SUSY across different experimental scenarios and discusses the impact of uncertainties.

Findings

Exclusion bounds for stops range from 900 GeV to 1500 GeV.

Gluino bounds range from 1700 GeV to 2500 GeV.

Discovery potential is limited without significant reduction in uncertainties.

Abstract

As we anticipate the first results of the 2016 run, we assess the discovery potential of the LHC to `natural supersymmetry'. To begin with, we explore the region of the model parameter space that can be excluded with various centre-of-mass energies (13 TeV and 14 TeV) and different luminosities (20 fb$^{-1}$, 100 fb$^{-1}$, 300 fb$^{-1}$ and 3000 fb$^{-1}$). We find that the bounds at 95% CL on stops vary from $m_{\tilde{t}_1}\gtrsim 900$ GeV expected this summer to $m_{\tilde{t}_1}\gtrsim 1500$ GeV at the end of the high luminosity run, while gluino bounds are expected to range from $m_{\tilde{g}}\gtrsim 1700$ GeV to $m_{\tilde{g}}\gtrsim 2500$ GeV over the same time period. However, more pessimistically we find that if no signal begins to appear this summer, only a very small region of parameter space can be discovered with 5-$\sigma$ significance. For this conclusion to change, we find that both theoretical and systematic uncertainties will need to be significantly reduced.