Gluino reach and mass extraction at the LHC in radiatively-driven natural SUSY

TL;DR

This paper explores how to detect and measure gluino masses at the LHC within radiatively-driven natural SUSY models, proposing specific event selection strategies to identify signals even with very heavy squarks.

Contribution

It introduces a method to isolate gluino signals at the LHC in RNS models and demonstrates the potential for precise gluino mass measurement up to 2.8 TeV.

Findings

Gluino signals can be distinguished with specific cuts at high luminosity.

Gluino mass can be measured with 2.5-5% precision.

Detection is feasible for gluino masses up to 2.8 TeV.

Abstract

Radiatively-driven natural SUSY (RNS) models enjoy electroweak naturalness at the $10\%$ level while respecting LHC sparticle and Higgs mass constraints. Gluino and top squark masses can range up to several TeV (with other squarks even heavier) but a set of light Higgsinos are required with mass not too far above $m_h\sim 125$ GeV. Within the RNS framework, gluinos dominantly decay via ${\tilde g} \to t{\tilde t}_1^{*},\ \bar{t}{\tilde t}_1 \to t\bar{t}{\widetilde Z}_{1,2}$ or $t\bar{b}{\widetilde W}_1^-+c.c.$, where the decay products of the higgsino-like ${\widetilde W}_1$ and ${\widetilde Z}_2$ are very soft. Gluino pair production is, therefore, signalled by events with up to four hard $b$-jets and large ${\not\!\!{E_T}}$. We devise a set of cuts to isolate a relatively pure gluino sample at the (high luminosity) LHC and show that in the RNS model with very heavy squarks, the gluino signal will be accessible for $m_{{\tilde g}} < 2400 \ (2800)$ GeV for an integrated luminosity of 300 (3000) fb$^{-1}$. We also show that the measurement of the rate of gluino events in the clean sample mentioned above allows for a determination of $m_{{\tilde g}}$ with a statistical precision of $2.5-5\%$ (depending on the integrated luminosity and the gluino mass) over the range of gluino masses where a $5\sigma$ discovery is possible at the LHC.