Probing compressed sleptons at the LHC using vector boson fusion processes

The vector boson fusion (VBF) topology at the Large Hadron Collider at 14 TeV provides an opportunity to search for new physics. A feasibility study for the search of sleptons in a compressed mass spectra scenario is presented in the final state of two jets, one or two low $p_T$ nonresonant leptons, and missing energy. The presence of the VBF tagged jets and missing energy are effective in reducing standard model backgrounds. Using smuon production with a mass difference between ${\tilde{l}}_L$ and ${\tilde{\chi }}_1^0$ of 5–15 GeV, the significance of observing the signal events is found to be $\sim 3–6\sigma$ for $m_{\tilde{l}}=115–135\mathrm{GeV}$, considering an integrated luminosity of $3000{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$.

Figure 1

Distribution of $p_{T_{\mu }}$ in the ${\tilde{l}}_L$ pair, ${\tilde{l}}_L{\tilde{\nu }}^{*}$ ($\tilde{l}{}_L^{*}\tilde{\nu }$) and $VV+\mathrm{jet}$ events for the benchmark point $(m_{{\tilde{l}}_L},m_{{\tilde{\chi }}_1^0})=(115\mathrm{GeV},110\mathrm{GeV})$. All distributions shown in the figure are after VBF cuts, ${\cancel{E}}_T$ and $H_T$ requirements but without the $p_{T_{\mu }}$ upper-bound cuts. This figure is a representative of the plots used for our shape based analysis.