Shortcomings of the squark simplified model

Abstract

We argue that the squark simplified model commonly used in collider analyses fails to represent realistic low-energy supersymmetric models and significantly underestimates squark production rates at hadron colliders. This has important implications for extracting squark mass limits at the LHC and assessing the potential reach of HL-LHC or the FCC-hh. In particular, we find that the current LHC squark mass limit is realistically in the range of 2.6-3.0 TeV, rather than the 1.7-1.8 TeV range that is typically quoted based on the simplified model.