Scenery from the top: Study of the third generation squarks at the CERN LHC

Abstract

In the minimal supersymmetric standard model the properties of the third generation sfermions are important from the viewpoint of discriminating the SUSY breaking models and in the determination of the Higgs boson mass. If gluinos are copiously produced at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, gluino decays into $t\overline{b}{\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\chi}}}_{1}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ through a top squark and sbottom can be studied using hadronic decays of the top quark. Using a W sideband method to estimate combinatorial backgrounds, the kinematical end point of the gluino decays can be measured. This implies that the fundamental parameters related to the third generation squarks might be reliably determined. The top-quark polarization dependence in the decay process may also be extracted by looking at the b jet distribution near the kinematical end point.