Light Stop Decays: Implications for LHC Searches

Understand

We investigate the flavour-changing neutral current decay of the lightest stop into a charm quark and the lightest neutralino and its four-body decay into the lightest neutralino, a down-type quark and a fermion pair.

• These are the relevant stop search channels in the low-mass region.
• The SUSY-QCD corrections to the two-body decay have been calculated for the first time and turn out to be sizeable.
• In the four-body decay both the contributions from diagrams with flavour-changing neutral current (FCNC) couplings and the mass effects of final state bottom quarks and $\tau$ leptons have been taken into account, which are not available in the literature so far.