Electroweakinos Hiding in Higgs Searches

Abstract

Direct production of electroweakly charged states may not produce the high energy jets or the significant missing energy required in many new physics searches at the LHC. However, because these states produce leptons, they are still potentially detectable over the sizeable Standard Model backgrounds. We show that current LHC Higgs searches, particularly in the WW* and ZZ* channels, are sensitive to new electroweak states, such as supersymmetric charginos or neutralinos. Indeed, the 1.7 fb^{-1} Higgs searches can provide the strongest limits in certain regions of parameter space, extending the LEP bound up to ~200 GeV in some cases. Additionally, electroweakino production can form an interesting physics background for Higgs searches, especially at low luminosity and statistics. We show that dilepton searches with low missing energy requirements are complementary to existing searches in exploring regions of parameter space where new electroweak states are light or have compressed spectra.

7 pages, 7 figures; v2 has a corrected typo in Fig. 3 and subsections in Sec. III

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Higgs Production Amidst the LHC Detector
• New Physics backgrounds to the H -> WW search at the LHC?
• WZ plus missing-E_T signal from gaugino pair production at LHC7
• Casting Light on BSM Physics with SM Standard Candles
• Probing compressed mass spectra in electroweak supersymmetry with Recursive Jigsaw Reconstruction