Boosting Stop Searches with a 100 TeV Proton Collider

58 citations (54 excluding self-citations).

The Problem

At a 100 TeV proton collider, stop squarks with masses in the multi-TeV range would be produced with enormous boosts, sending the top quarks from their decays into kinematic regimes far beyond what LHC-era top taggers were designed for. Standard top-tagging algorithms rely on resolving the three-prong substructure of hadronic top decays, but at extreme boosts the decay products merge into a single narrow jet where traditional substructure variables lose discrimination power. A new, robust approach to identifying boosted tops was needed for the future collider program.

The Key Idea

Rather than fighting the merging of top decay products, we exploited it by constructing a simple top tagger based on the presence of a muon inside a fat jet. When a top decays semileptonically, the muon from the W is collimated into the same jet as the b-quark at high boost. Requiring a muon-in-jet is detector-independent, does not rely on calorimeter granularity, and works across the full range of boosts a 100 TeV collider would produce. With this tagger and 3000 fb^-1, the projected discovery reach extends to stop masses of 6.5 TeV, with exclusion sensitivity up to 8 TeV. This work was part of the broader effort to define the physics case for future colliders using simplified model benchmarks.

Recollections

[To be added.]

• DOI
• arXiv:1406.4512
• INSPIRE