Combined collider constraints on neutralinos and charginos

Abstract

Searches for supersymmetric electroweakinos have entered a crucial phase, as the integrated luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider is now high enough to compensate for their weak production cross-sections. Working in a framework where the neutralinos and charginos are the only light sparticles in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, we use GAMBIT to perform a detailed likelihood analysis of the electroweakino sector. We focus on the impacts of recent ATLAS and CMS searches with 36/fb of 13 TeV proton-proton collision data. We also include constraints from LEP and invisible decays of the $Z$ and Higgs bosons. Under the background-only hypothesis, we show that current LHC searches do not robustly exclude any range of neutralino or chargino masses. However, a pattern of excesses in several LHC analyses points towards a possible signal, with neutralino masses of ($m_{\tilde{\chi}_1^0}$, $m_{\tilde{\chi}_2^0}$, $m_{\tilde{\chi}_3^0}$, $m_{\tilde{\chi}_4^0}$) = (8–155, 103–260, 130–473, 219–502) GeV and chargino masses of ($m_{\tilde{\chi}_1^{\pm}}$, $m_{\tilde{\chi}_2^{\pm}}$) = (104–259, 224–507) GeV at the 95% confidence level. The lightest neutralino is mostly bino, with a possible modest Higgsino or wino component. We find that this excess has a combined local significance of $3.3\sigma$, subject to a number of cautions. If one includes LHC searches for charginos and neutralinos conducted with 8 TeV proton-proton collision data, the local significance is lowered to $2.9\sigma$. We briefly consider the implications for dark matter, finding that the correct relic density can be obtained through the Higgs-funnel and $Z$-funnel mechanisms, even assuming that all other sparticles are decoupled. All samples, GAMBIT input files and best-fit models from this study are available on Zenodo.

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Weihai
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Andrew Fowlie
Assistant Professor

My research interests include particle physics and statistics.