Search strategy for gluinos at the LHC with a Higgs boson decaying into tau leptons

Ernesto Arganda; Antonio Delgado; Roberto A. Morales; Mariano Quirós

doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10951-4

2024 Impact factor 4.8

Particles and Fields

Open Access

Eur. Phys. J. C (2022) 82: 971
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10951-4

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Search strategy for gluinos at the LHC with a Higgs boson decaying into tau leptons

Ernesto Arganda¹^,2, Antonio Delgado³^b, Roberto A. Morales¹ and Mariano Quirós⁴

¹ Instituto de Física Teórica UAM/CSIC, C/ Nicolás Cabrera 13-15, Campus de Cantoblanco, 28049, Madrid, Spain
² IFLP, CONICET-Dpto. de Física, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, C.C. 67, 1900, La Plata, Argentina
³ Department of Physics, University of Notre Dame, 225 Nieuwland Hall, 46556, Notre Dame, IN, USA
⁴ Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE) and BIST, Campus UAB, Bellaterra, 08193, Barcelona, Spain

^b adelgad2@nd.edu

Received: 15 December 2021
Accepted: 23 October 2022
Published online: 31 October 2022

Abstract

The possibility in supersymmetric scenarios that the dark matter candidate is a Higgsino-like neutralino means that its production can be associated with Higgs bosons. Taking advantage of this fact, we propose a LHC search strategy for gluinos with $τ$ $\tau$ leptons in the final state, coming from the decay of a Higgs boson. We consider the strong production of a pair of gluinos, one of which decays into the Higgsino plus jets while the other decays into the bino plus jets. In turn, this bino decays into the Higgsino plus a Higgs boson which finally decays into a $τ$ $\tau$ -lepton pair. Therefore, the experimental signature under study consists of 4 jets, 2 $τ$ $\tau$ leptons, and a large amount of missing transverse energy. This work represents a proof of principle of a search that is sensitive to a spectrum such that the gluino does not directly decay to the dark matter candidate but to an intermediate electroweakino that then produces Higgs bosons in its subsequent decay. Our cut-based search strategy allows us to reach, for a LHC center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV and a total integrated luminosity of 1 ab $^{- 1}$ $^{-1}$ , significances of up to 2 standard deviations, considering systematic uncertainties in the SM background of 30%. The projections for 3 ab $^{- 1}$ $^{-1}$ are encouraging, with significances at the evidence level, which in more optimistic experimental scenarios could exceed 4 standard deviations.

© The Author(s) 2022

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