Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Probing Squeezed Bino-Smuon Spectra with the Large Hadron Collider

Tathagata Ghosh

U Hawaii

In this talk, I’ll discuss a Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model scenario in which the only light superparticles are a bino-like dark matter candidate and a nearly-degenerate smuon. It is notoriously difficult to probe this scenario at the Large Hadron Collider, because the smuon pair-production process yields a final state with soft muons and small missing transverse momentum. We examine this scenario where the mass difference between the lightest neutralino and the lightest smuon (Δ*m*) is less than 60 GeV, focusing on the process in which additional jets provide a transverse boost to the smuon pair. I’ll present search strategies that can dramatically improve both signal sensitivity and the signal-to-background ratio, permitting discovery at the Large Hadron Collider with a reasonable integrated luminosity over the interesting region of parameter space. Although we focus on a particular model, the results generalize to a variety of scenarios in which the dark matter and a scalar muon partner are nearly degenerate in mass.