Pinning Down the Invisible Sneutrino at the ILC

Using the event generator WHIZARD we study in a realistic ILC environment the prospects of measuring properties of sneutrinos that decay invisibly into the lightest neutralino and the neutrino.

Pinning down the Invisible Sneutrino

For points in SUSY parameter space where the sneutrino is lighter than the lightest chargino and next-to-lightest neutralino, its direct mass determination from sneutrino pair production process at e+e- collider is impossible since it decays invisibly. In such a scenario the sneutrino can be discovered and its mass determined from measurements of two-body decays of charginos produced in pairs at the ILC. Using the event generator WHIZARD we study the prospects of measuring sneutrino properties in a realistic ILC environment. In our analysis we include beamstrahlung, initial state radiation, a complete account of reducible backgrounds from SM and SUSY processes, and a complete matrix-element calculation of the SUSY signal which encompasses all irreducible background and interference contributions. We also simulate photon induced background processes using exact matrix elements. Radiation effects and the cuts to reduce background strongly modify the edges of the lepton energy spectra from which the sneutrino and chargino mass are determined. We discuss possible approaches to measure the sneutrino mass with optimal precision.

(N)LO Simulation of Chargino Production and Decay

We consider NLO chargino production and decays at the ILC. For this, we present an NLO extension of the Monte Carlo Event Generator Whizard including the NLO production. For photonic corrections, we use both a fixed order and a resummation approach. The latter method evades the problem of negative event weights and automatically includes leading higher order corrections. We present results for cross sections and event generation for both methods. As a first step towards a full NLO Monte Carlo, we consider a LO implementation of the chargino production and subsequent leptonic decay and investigate the precision of the sneutrino mass determination by means of lepton energy distributions in chargino decays. The SM and SUSY backgrounds are included in our study using full matrix elements as well as smearing effects from ISR and beamstrahlung. Without using energy distribution fits, the sneutrino mass can be determined with an error in the percent regime.