On the ATLAS Top Mass Measurements and the Potential for Stealth Stop Contamination

Understand

The discovery of the stop - the Supersymmetric partner of the top quark - is a key goal of the physics program enabled by the Large Hadron Collider.

• Although much of the accessible parameter space has already been probed, all current searches assume the top mass is known.
• This is relevant for the "stealth stop" regime, which is characterized by decay kinematics that force the final state top quark off its mass shell; such decays would contaminate the top mass measurements.
• We investigate the resulting bias imparted to the template method based ATLAS approach.