Search for a light Higgs boson in SUSY cascades

This note presents the potential of the CMS experiment to discover a light supersymmetric Higgs boson (h0) produced at the end of a cascade of supersymmetric particles starting with the strong production of squarks and gluinos. Because of this production mechanism, the events can be efficiently triggered using inclusive SUSY triggers such as jet+MET and the dominant h0 -> b bbar decay mode of the Higgs boson can be exploited. The Higgs mass can be extracted from the reconstructed di-b-jet effective mass distribution. The present investigation for the so-called LM5 test point has been done for 1, 3 and 10 fb-1

Improving the sensitivity of stop searches with on-shell constrained invariant mass variables

The search for light stops is of paramount importance, both in general as a promising path to the discovery of beyond the standard model physics and more specifically as a way of evaluating the success of the naturalness paradigm. While the LHC experiments have ruled out much of the relevant parameter space, there are "stop gaps", i.e., values of sparticle masses for which existing LHC analyses have relatively little sensitivity to light stops. We point out that techniques involving on-shell constrained M_2 variables can do much to enhance sensitivity in this region and hence help close the stop gaps. We demonstrate the use of these variables for several benchmark points and describe the effect of realistic complications, such as detector effects and combinatorial backgrounds, in order to provide a useful toolkit for light stop searches in particular, and new physics searches at the LHC in general.Comment: 49 pages, 28 figures, revised version published in JHEP, references adde

On-shell constrained M2M_2 variables with applications to mass measurements and topology disambiguation

We consider a class of on-shell constrained mass variables that are 3+1 dimensional generalizations of the Cambridge $M_{T2}$ variable and that automatically incorporate various assumptions about the underlying event topology. The presence of additional on-shell constraints causes their kinematic distributions to exhibit sharper endpoints than the usual $M_{T2}$ distribution. We study the mathematical properties of these new variables, e.g., the uniqueness of the solution selected by the minimization over the invisible particle 4-momenta. We then use this solution to reconstruct the masses of various particles along the decay chain. We propose several tests for validating the assumed event topology in missing energy events from new physics. The tests are able to determine: 1) whether the decays in the event are two-body or three-body, 2) if the decay is two-body, whether the intermediate resonances in the two decay chains are the same, and 3) the exact sequence in which the visible particles are emitted from each decay chain.Comment: 44pages, 17 figures. revised version, published in JHEP. Minor addition: a paragraph discussing the effect on the background at the end of section 5.

OPTIMASS: A Package for the Minimization of Kinematic Mass Functions with Constraints

Reconstructed mass variables, such as $M_2$, $M_{2C}$, $M_T^\star$, and $M_{T2}^W$, play an essential role in searches for new physics at hadron colliders. The calculation of these variables generally involves constrained minimization in a large parameter space, which is numerically challenging. We provide a C++ code, OPTIMASS, which interfaces with the MINUIT library to perform this constrained minimization using the Augmented Lagrangian Method. The code can be applied to arbitrarily general event topologies and thus allows the user to significantly extend the existing set of kinematic variables. We describe this code and its physics motivation, and demonstrate its use in the analysis of the fully leptonic decay of pair-produced top quarks using the $M_2$ variables.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, (1) minor revision in section 3, (2) figure added in section 4.3, (3) reference added and (4) matched with published versio

Detection of MSSM Higgs bosons from supersymmetric particle cascade decays at the LHC

In the context of the Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, we study the production of Higgs bosons at the Large Hadron Collider via cascade decays of scalar quarks and gluinos. We focus on the cascades involving heavier charginos and neutralinos, which decay into the neutral $h,A,H$ and charged $H^\pm$ bosons and lighter charginos and neutralinos, but we will also discuss direct decays of third--generation squarks into their lighter partners and Higgs bosons as well as top quark decays into $H^\pm$ bosons. We show that the production rates of relatively light Higgs bosons, M_\Phi \lsim 250 GeV, via these mechanisms can be rather large in some areas of the parameter space. Performing a fast detector simulation analysis that takes into account the signals and the various backgrounds, we show that the detection of the neutral Higgs bosons through their decays into $b\bar{b}$ pairs, and of the charged Higgs particles through the $\tau^\pm \nu$ signature, is possible at the LHC.Comment: 44 pages, latex, 17 figure

Discovery potential of top-partners in a realistic composite Higgs model with early LHC data

Composite Higgs models provide a natural, non-supersymmetric solution to the hierarchy problem. In these models, one or more sets of heavy top-partners are typically introduced. Some of these new quarks can be relatively light, with a mass of a few hundred GeV, and could be observed with the early LHC collision data expected to be collected during 2010. We analyse in detail the collider signatures that these new quarks can produce. We show that final states with two (same-sign) or three leptons are the most promising discovery channels. They can yield a 5 sigma excess over the Standard Model expectation already with the 2010 LHC collision data. Exotic quarks of charge 5/3 are a distinctive feature of this model. We present a new method to reconstruct their masses from their leptonic decay without relying on jets in the final state.Comment: 28 pages 11 Figures 7 Tables, minor changes, added references, matches published versio