No Arabic abstract
The CMS and the ATLAS Collaborations have recently reported on the search for supersymmetry with 35 pb$^{-1}$ of data and have put independent limits on the parameter space of the supergravity unified model with universal boundary conditions at the GUT scale for soft breaking, i.e., the mSUGRA model. We extend this study by examining other regions of the mSUGRA parameter space in $A_0$ and $tanbeta$. Further, we contrast the reach of CMS and ATLAS with 35 pb$^{-1}$ of data with the indirect constraints, i.e., the constraints from the Higgs boson mass limits, from flavor physics and from the dark matter limits from WMAP. Specifically it is found that a significant part of the parameter space excluded by CMS and ATLAS is essentially already excluded by the indirect constraints and the fertile region of parameter space has yet to be explored. We also emphasize that gluino masses as low as 400 GeV but for squark masses much larger than the gluino mass remain unconstrained and further that much of the hyperbolic branch of radiative electroweak symmetry breaking, with low values of the Higgs mixing parameter $mu$, is essentially untouched by the recent LHC analysis.
Being able to measure the polarization of quarks produced in various processes at the LHC would be of fundamental significance. Measuring the polarizations of quarks produced in new physics processes, once discovered, can provide crucial information about the new physics Lagrangian. In a series of recent papers, we have investigated how quark polarization measurements can be done in practice. The polarizations of heavy quarks (b and c) are expected to be largely preserved in the lightest baryons they hadronize into, the Lambda_b and Lambda_c, respectively. Furthermore, it is known experimentally that s-quark polarization is preserved as well, in Lambda baryons. We study how ATLAS and CMS can measure polarizations of b, c and s quarks using certain decays of these baryons. We propose to use the Standard Model ttbar and Wc samples to calibrate these measurements. We estimate that the Run 2 dataset will suffice for measuring the quark polarizations in these Standard Model samples with precisions of order 10%. We also propose various additional measurements for the near and far future that would help characterize the polarization transfer from the quarks to the baryons.
We interpret within the phenomenological MSSM (pMSSM) the results of SUSY searches published by the CMS collaboration based on the first ~1 fb^-1 of data taken during the 2011 LHC run at 7 TeV. The pMSSM is a 19-dimensional parametrization of the MSSM that captures most of its phenomenological features. It encompasses, and goes beyond, a broad range of more constrained SUSY models. Performing a global Bayesian analysis, we obtain posterior probability densities of parameters, masses and derived observables. In contrast to constraints derived for particular SUSY breaking schemes, such as the CMSSM, our results provide more generic conclusions on how the current data constrain the MSSM.
Polarization of strange quarks is preserved to a high degree when they hadronize into Lambda baryons, as observed in Z decays at LEP. This opens up the possibility for ATLAS and CMS to use strange-quark polarization measurements as a characterization tool for new physics scenarios that produce such quarks. Measurements in ttbar samples would be useful for obtaining additional information about the polarization transfer from the strange quark to the Lambda baryon. Already with 100/fb in Run 2, ttbar samples in ATLAS and CMS become competitive in sensitivity with the Z samples of the LEP experiments. Moreover, while the LEP measurements were done inclusively over all quark flavors, which makes their interpretation dependent on various modeling assumptions, ttbar events at the LHC offer multiple handles for disentangling the different contributions experimentally. We also discuss the possibility of measuring polarizations of up and down quarks.
Constraints on dark matter from the first CMS and ATLAS SUSY searches are investigated. It is shown that within the minimal supergravity model, the early search for supersymmetry at the LHC has depleted a large portion of the signature space in dark matter direct detection experiments. In particular, the prospects for detecting signals of dark matter in the XENON and CDMS experiments are significantly affected in the low neutralino mass region. Here the relic density of dark matter typically arises from slepton coannihilations in the early universe. In contrast, it is found that the CMS and ATLAS analyses leave untouched the Higgs pole and the Hyperbolic Branch/Focus Point regions, which are now being probed by the most recent XENON results. Analysis is also done for supergravity models with non-universal soft breaking where one finds that a part of the dark matter signature space depleted by the CMS and ATLAS cuts in the minimal SUGRA case is repopulated. Thus, observation of dark matter in the LHC depleted region of minimal supergravity may indicate non-universalities in soft breaking.
The CMS experiment recently reported an excess consistent with an invariant mass edge in opposite-sign same flavor (OSSF) leptons, when produced in conjunction with at least two jets and missing transverse momentum. We provide an interpretation of the edge in terms of (anti-)squark pair production followed by the `golden cascade decay for one of the squarks: $tilde q rightarrow tildechi_2^0 q to tilde l l q to tildechi_1^0 q l l$ in the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). A simplified model involving binos, winos, an on-shell slepton, and the first two generations of squarks fits the event rate and the invariant mass edge. We check consistency with a recent ATLAS search in a similar region, finding that much of the good-fit parameter space is still allowed at the 95% confidence level (CL). However, a combination of other LHC searches, notably two-lepton stop pair searches and jets plus $p_T^{rm miss}$, rule out all of the remaining parameter space at the 95% CL.