It's On: Early Interpretations of ATLAS Results in Jets and Missing Energy Searches

48 citations (42 excluding self-citations).

The Problem

When ATLAS released its first supersymmetry search results with just 70 inverse nanobarns of data, the collaboration presented limits in terms of specific mSUGRA benchmark points. But the question physicists actually wanted answered was simpler and more general: has the LHC surpassed the Tevatron? For compressed spectra, where the gluino and LSP are close in mass, the Tevatron still held the best limits, and it was not obvious from the official ATLAS presentation whether the new data improved on them.

The Key Idea

We reinterpreted the ATLAS results using the model-independent jets+MET framework to extract limits on gluino masses as a function of the LSP mass, covering the full two-dimensional plane rather than isolated benchmark points. The result: gluino masses below 205 GeV were disfavored regardless of the LSP mass, and for some spectra the reach extended to 295 GeV, already surpassing the Tevatron for compressed spectra. This was one of the first external reinterpretations of LHC data, demonstrating the value of the reinterpretable search philosophy developed in “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and the original jets+MET paper.

Recollections

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• DOI
• arXiv:1008.0407
• INSPIRE