European Physical Journal C: Particles and Fields (May 2019)

Combined collider constraints on neutralinos and charginos

  • GAMBIT Collaboration:,
  • Peter Athron,
  • Csaba Balázs,
  • Andy Buckley,
  • Jonathan M. Cornell,
  • Matthias Danninger,
  • Ben Farmer,
  • Andrew Fowlie,
  • Tomás E. Gonzalo,
  • Julia Harz,
  • Paul Jackson,
  • Rose Kudzman-Blais,
  • Anders Kvellestad,
  • Gregory D. Martinez,
  • Andreas Petridis,
  • Are Raklev,
  • Christopher Rogan,
  • Pat Scott,
  • Abhishek Sharma,
  • Martin White,
  • Yang Zhang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-6837-x
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 79, no. 5
pp. 1 – 52

Abstract

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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 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 = (8–155, 103–260, 130–473, 219–502) GeV and chargino masses of = (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 $$3.3\sigma $$ 3.3σ , 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$$\sigma $$ σ . 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.