Michael Hance (UCSC) "Searching for Compressed SUSY at the Energy Frontier"

ABSTRACT:
Weak-scale Supersymmetry can help to resolve several puzzles presented by the Standard Model, including the nature of dark matter and the naturalness of the Higgs mass, and has motivated a robust search program at the Large Hadron Collider. Searches for direct production of Supersymmetric partners of weak bosons and leptons are particularly interesting as probes of dark matter and naturalness, but are challenged by small cross sections, low-momentum decay products, and multiple Standard Model backgrounds. I will review efforts by the ATLAS experiment to discover such new particles, with an emphasis on scenarios with “compressed” mass spectra containing nearly-mass-degenerate states. I will discuss recent LHC results, as well as prospects for discovery in Run 2 and beyond.