Abstract
Light stops are a hallmark of the most natural realizations of weak-scale supersymmetry. While stops have been extensively searched for, there remain open gaps around and below the top mass, due to similarities of stop and top signals with current statistics. We propose a new fast-track avenue to improve light stop searches for R-parity-conserving supersymmetry by comparing top cross section measurements to the theoretical prediction. Stop masses below ∼180 GeV can now be ruled out for a light neutralino. The possibility of a stop signal contaminating the top mass measurement is also briefly addressed.
Highlights
One of the open questions in particle physics is why the weak and gravitational forces have such different strengths
The measured top production cross section by the analysis we considered lies below the current Standard Model (SM) prediction, strengthening the stop limits
The idea of using precision SM measurements to constrain BSM physics is well known for indirect observables, but mostly unexplored at high energy colliders, such as the LHC, where a dichotomy between “measurements” and “searches” is often present
Summary
One of the open questions in particle physics is why the weak and gravitational forces have such different strengths. Weak-scale supersymmetry (SUSY) is a leading candidate for such a microscopic solution of the hierarchy problem and the mechanism is most natural if the partners of the SM particles having the largest coupling to the Higgs field are light [1, 2], the top squark being the most prominent one. This region of the SUSY parameter space has been called Natural SUSY in recent years [3]. While model-dependent limits in these gaps arise from indirect Higgs couplings constraints (see e.g. [46,47,48,49,50]) and from t → c χ10 searches [34, 39], we stress that no robust exclusion is currently available
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