Compressed SUSY search at the 13 TeV LHC using kinematic correlations and structure of ISR jets

Abstract

The LHC search for nearly degenerate gluinos and neutralinos, which can occur, for example, in SUSY axion models, is limited by the reduced missing transverse momentum and effective mass in the events. We propose the use of kinematic correlations between jets coming from initial state radiation (ISR) in gluino pair production events at the 13TeV LHC. A significant improvement in the signal to background ratio is obtained for the highly compressed gluino-neutralino search, by using cuts on the rapidity and azimuthal angle separation between the pair of tagged jets with the highest transverse momenta. Furthermore, the distribution of the azimuthal angle difference between the tagged jets in the ˜g˜g+jets process is found to be distinctly different from the dominant background process of Z+jets. We also find quark and gluon jet tagging methods to be useful in separating the signal, which contains a higher fraction of gluon initiated jets compared to the dominant backgrounds.