Enhancing the discovery prospects for SUSY-like decays with a forgotten kinematic variable

Abstract

The lack of a new physics signal thus far at the Large Hadron Collider motivates us to consider how to look for challenging final states, with large Standard Model backgrounds and subtle kinematic features, such as cascade decays with compressed spectra. Adopting a benchmark SUSY-like decay topology with a four-body final state proceeding through a sequence of two-body decays via intermediate resonances, we focus our attention on the kinematic variable Δ4 which previously has been used to parameterize the boundary of the allowed four-body phase space. We highlight the advantages of using Δ4 as a discovery variable, and present an analysis suggesting that the pairing of Δ4 with another invariant mass variable leads to a significant improvement over more conventional variable choices and techniques.