https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-013-2342-9
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Searching the sbottom in the four lepton channel at the LHC
1
Department of Theoretical Physics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai, India
2
Department of High Energy Physics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai, India
* e-mail: dipan@tifr.res.in
Received:
22
November
2012
Revised:
4
February
2013
Published online:
27
March
2013
Direct searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have pushed the lower limits on the masses of the gluinos (
) and the squarks of the first two generations (
) to the TeV range. On the other hand, the limits are rather weak for the third generation squarks and masses around a few hundred GeV are still allowed. A comparatively light third generation of squarks is also consistent with the lightest Higgs boson with mass ∼125 GeV. In view of this, we consider the direct production of a pair of sbottom quarks (
) at the LHC and study their collider signatures. We focus on the scenario where the is not the next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle (NLSP) and hence can also decay to channels other than the commonly considered decay mode to a bottom quark and the lightest neutralino (
). For example, we consider the decay modes containing a bottom quark and the second neutralino (
) and/or a top quark and the lightest chargino (
) following the leptonic decays of the neutralino, chargino and the top quark giving rise to a four leptons (ℓ) + two b-jets + missing transverse momentum ([Equation not available: see fulltext.] ) final state. We show that a sbottom mass ≲550 GeV can be probed in this channel at the 14 TeV LHC energy with integrated luminosity ≲100 fb−1.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg and Società Italiana di Fisica, 2013
