Closing in on the Tip of the CMSSM Stau Coannihilation Strip

Abstract

Near the tip of the stau coannihilation strip in the CMSSM with a neutralino LSP, the astrophysical cold dark matter density constraint forces the stau-neutralino mass difference to be small. If this mass difference is smaller than the tau mass, the stau may decay either in the outer part of an LHC detector - the `disappearing track' signature - or be sufficiently long-lived to leave the detector before decaying - the long-lived massive charged-particle signature. We combine searches for these signatures with conventional missing transverse energy searches during LHC Run 1, identifying the small remaining parts of the CMSSM stau coannihilation strip region that have not yet been excluded, and discussing how they may be explored during Run 2 of the LHC.

Comments: 19 pages, 6 figures. Fig. 1 and the corresponding text are changed due to the updated ATLAS result (ref.[16]). More details of our simulation are provided in Section 3.1. The caption of Fig. 6 and the corresponding text are changed. Matches the published version