Opening up the compressed region of stop searches at 13 TeV LHC

Abstract

Light top superpartners play a key role in stabilizing the electroweak scale in supersymmetric theories. For $R$-parity conserved supersymmetric models, traditional searches are not sensitive to the compressed regions. In this paper, we propose a new method targeting this region, with stop and neutralino mass splitting ranging from $m_{\tilde{t}}-m_{\chi }\gtrsim m_t$ to about 20 GeV. In particular, we focus on the signal process in which a pair of stops are produced in association with a hard jet, and define a new observable $R_M$ whose distribution has a peak in this compressed region. The position of the peak is closely correlated with $m_{\tilde{t}}$. We show that for 13 TeV LHC with a luminosity of 3000 fb${}^{-1}$, this analysis can extend the reach of stop in the compressed region to $m_{\tilde{t}}$ around 800 GeV.

Comments: 5 pages and 3 figures, references added, final version