Heavy-flavour tagging and the supersymmetry reach of the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Understand

The branching fraction for the decays of gluinos to third generation quarks is expected to be enhanced in classes of supersymmetric models where either third generation squarks are lighter than other squarks, or in mixed-higgsino dark matter models constructed to be in concordance with the measured density of cold dark matter.

• In such scenarios, gluino production events at the CERN Large Hadron Collider should be rich in top and bottom quark jets.
• Requiring b-jets in addition to missing transverse energy should, therefore, enhance the supersymmetry signal relative to Standard Model backgrounds from V + jet, VV and QCD backgrounds (V=W, Z).
• We quantify the increase in the supersymmetry reach of the LHC from b-tagging in a variety of well-motivated models of supersymmetry.