Probing the flavor violating scalar top quark signal at the LHC

Belanger, Genevieve and Ghosh, Diptimoy and Godbole, Rohini and Guchait, Monoranjan and Sengupta, Dipan (2014) Probing the flavor violating scalar top quark signal at the LHC. In: PHYSICAL REVIEW D, 89 (1).

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Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has completed its run at 8 TeV with the experiments ATLAS and CMS having collected about 25 fb(-1) of data each. Discovery of a light Higgs boson coupled with lack of evidence for supersymmetry at the LHC so far, has motivated studies of supersymmetry in the context of naturalness with the principal focus being the third generation squarks. In this work, we analyze the prospects of the flavor violating decay mode (t) over tilde (1) -> c chi(0)(1) at 8 and 13 TeV center-of-mass energy at the LHC. This channel is also relevant in the dark matter context for the stop-coannihilation scenario, where the relic density depends on the mass difference between the lighter stop quark ((t) over tilde (1)) and the lightest neutralino (chi(0)(1)) states. This channel is extremely challenging to probe, especially for situations when the mass difference between the lighter stop quark and the lightest neutralino is small. Using certain kinematical properties of signal events we find that the level of backgrounds can be reduced substantially. We find that the prospect for this channel is limited due to the low production cross section for top squarks and limited luminosity at 8 TeV, but at the 13 TeV LHC with 100 fb(-1) luminosity, it is possible to probe top squarks with masses up to similar to 450 GeV. We also discuss how the sensitivity could be significantly improved by tagging charm jets.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	PHYSICAL REVIEW D
Publisher:	AMER PHYSICAL SOC
Additional Information:	Copyright for this article belongs to the AMER PHYSICAL SOC, ONE PHYSICS ELLIPSE, COLLEGE PK, MD 20740-3844 USA
Department/Centre:	Division of Physical & Mathematical Sciences > Centre for High Energy Physics
Date Deposited:	23 Apr 2014 06:41
Last Modified:	23 Apr 2014 06:41
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/48881

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