Probing compressed higgsinos with forward protons at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel search strategy using forward proton detectors at the LHC to detect nearly-degenerate higgsinos in supersymmetry, achieving significant sensitivity to chargino masses up to 270-308 GeV.

Contribution

It introduces a photon fusion-based method with forward detectors to probe compressed higgsino scenarios at the LHC, enhancing detection prospects for nearly-degenerate supersymmetric particles.

Findings

Can exclude chargino masses up to 270 GeV with 100 fb$^{-1}$

Can exclude chargino masses up to 308 GeV with 3 ab$^{-1}$

Effective for small mass splittings between chargino and neutralino

Abstract

Supersymmetric models with nearly-degenerate light higgsinos provide a consistent solution to the naturalness problem under rigorous constraints from current experimental searches for sparticles. However, it is challenging to probe the compressed scenarios at collider experiments due to the hard-to-detect soft final states. To overcome this issue, strategies have been proposed to take advantage of the photon fusion along the ultraperipheral collision at the Large Hadron Collider, which are feasible with the forward detectors installed at the ATLAS and CMS detectors. In this paper, we demonstrate a search strategy for the chargino pair production via photon fusion at the 13 TeV LHC, realizing a good sensitivity that can exclude $m_{\tilde{\chi}^{\pm}_{1}}$ up to 270 GeV (308 GeV) for a mass splitting $\Delta m(\tilde{\chi}^{\pm}_{1},\tilde{\chi}^{0}_{1})\in[1,15]$ GeV with an integrated luminosity of 100 fb$^{-1}$ (3 ab$^{-1}$) at 95% C.L.