New angular and other cuts to improve the Higgsino signal at the LHC

Journal Article · Mon May 16 00:00:00 EDT 2022 · Physical Review D

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.105.095017· OSTI ID:1867901

Baer, Howard ; Barger, Vernon ; Sengupta, Dibyashree ; Tata, Xerxes

Motivated by the fact that naturalness arguments strongly suggest that the supersymmetry (SUSY)-preserving Higgsino mass parameter $\mu$ cannot be too far above the weak scale, we reexamine Higgsino pair production in association with a hard QCD jet at the High Luminosity LHC. We focus on ${\ell }^{+}{\ell }^{-}+{\overline{)E}}_T+j$ events from the production and subsequent decay, ${\tilde{\chi }}_2^0\to {\tilde{\chi }}_1^0{\ell }^{+}{\ell }^{-}$, of the heavier neutral Higgsino. The novel feature of our analysis is that we suggest angular cuts to reduce the important background from $Z(\to \tau \tau )+j$ events more efficiently than the $m_{\tau \tau }^2<0$ cut that has been used by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations. Other cuts, needed to reduce backgrounds from $t\overline{t}$, $WWj$, and $W/Z+\ell \overline{\ell }$ production, are also delineated. We plot out the reach of LHC14 for 300 and $3000{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ and also show distributions that serve to characterize the Higgsino signal, noting that Higgsinos may well be the only superpartners accessible at LHC14 in a well-motivated class of natural SUSY models.

• Research Organization: Univ. of Oklahoma, Norman, OK (United States); Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES); Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST)
• Grant/Contract Number: SC-0009956; SC-0017647; SC0009956; SC0017647; 110-2811-M-002-574
• OSTI ID: 1867901
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 1980082
• Journal Information: Physical Review D, Journal Name: Physical Review D Vol. 105 Journal Issue: 9; ISSN 2470-0010
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
Physics
Supersymmetric models