Hunting Asymmetric Stops

Abstract

We point out that in the irreducible natural SUSY spectrum, stops have comparable branching fractions to chargino-bottom and neutralino-top in the vast bulk of parameter space, provided only that both decay modes are kinematically accessible. The total stop pair branching fractions into ttbar + MET can therefore be reduced to O(50%), while b bbar + X branching fractions are typically much smaller, O(10%), thus limiting the reach of traditional stop searches. We propose a new stop search targeting the asymmetric final state tt* --> t chi^0 b chi^pm, which can restore sensitivity to natural stops in the 7 and 8 TeV LHC runs. In addition we present a new variable, topness, which efficiently suppresses the dominant top backgrounds to semi-leptonic top partner searches. We demonstrate the utility of topness in both our asymmetric search channel and traditional tt* --> ttbar + MET searches and show that it matches or out-performs existing variables.

5 pages, 4 figures. V2: version accepted for publication in PRL

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