Detection of SUSY in the Stau-Neutralino Coannihilation Region at the LHC

Abstract

We study the feasibility of detecting the stau neutralino (stau_1-neutralino_1)coannihilation region at the LHC using tau leptons. The signal is characterized by multiple low energy tau leptons from neutralino_2-->tau stau_1-->tau tau neutralino_1 decays, where the stau_1 and neutralino_1 mass difference (Delta M) is constrained to be 5-15 GeV by current experimental bounds including the bound on the amount of neutralino cold dark matter. Within the framework of minimal supergravity models, we show that if hadronically decaying tau's can be identified with 50% efficiency for visible pt >20 GeV the observation of such signals is possible in the final state of two tau leptons plus large missing energy and two jets. With a gluino mass of 830 GeV the signal can be observed with as few as 3-10 fb^-1 of data (depending on the size of Delta M). Using a mass measurement of the tau pairs with 10 fb^-1 we can determine dM with a statistical uncertainty of 12% for Delta M = 10 GeV and an additional systematic uncertainty of 14% if the gluino mass has an uncertainty of 5%.