Gauge Mediation at LHC: status and prospects

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the constraints and prospects of gauge mediation models at the LHC, highlighting bounds on superpartner masses, the impact of the Higgs mass constraint, and the potential for exclusion of certain NLSP scenarios with high luminosity.

Contribution

It provides updated bounds on superpartner masses in gauge mediation models considering the Higgs mass constraint and identifies promising LHC search topologies.

Findings

Strong lower bounds on gluino and right-handed squark masses.

Upper bounds on Higgsino and wino masses under certain conditions.

Potential to exclude stau, stop, and sbottom NLSP scenarios at high luminosity LHC.

Abstract

We show that the predictivity of general gauge mediation (GGM) with TeV-scale stops is greatly increased once the Higgs mass constraint is imposed. The most notable results are a strong lower bound on the mass of the gluino and right-handed squarks, and an upper bound on the Higgsino mass. If the mu-parameter is positive, the wino mass is also bounded from above. These constraints relax significantly for high messenger scales and as such long-lived NLSPs are favored in GGM. We identify a small set of most promising topologies for the neutralino/sneutrino NLSP scenarios and estimate the impact of the current bounds and the sensitivity of the high luminosity LHC. The stau, stop and sbottom NLSP scenarios can be robustly excluded at the high luminosity LHC.