ATLAS intensifies its search for supersymmetry
Where are all the new physics discoveries? There haven’t been any statistically significant signs of new particles detected in the data collected by the Large Hadron Collider since the Higgs Boson was discovered a decade ago. Could they be sneaking by the standard searches? The ATLAS collaboration presented novel searches for supersymmetric particles at the recent Rencontres de Moriond Conference.
SUSY, or supersymmetry in short, is an exciting theory that provides each elementary particle with a \”superpartner\”. This solves several problems within the Standard Model and may even provide a candidate for dark matter. ATLAS’s latest searches focused on charginos, neutralinos (the heavy superpartners to Standard Model force-carrying particle) and sleptons (the superpartners to Standard Model matter particles known as leptons). These particles, if produced at the LHC would \”decay\” into Standard Model particles, and the lightest neutrino.
ATLAS’s latest search for charginos, and sleptons, studied a region of particle mass that was previously unexplored because the Standard Model background processes mimicked the signals from the particles sought after. ATLAS researchers created dedicated searches for these SUSY particles, using data from Run 2 of LHC. They looked at the particle’s decay into two charged muons or electrons and the \”missing energy\”, attributed to neutrinos. The researchers used machine-learning and \”data-driven approaches\” to separate the signals from the background.
Source:
https://home.cern/news/news/physics/atlas-strengthens-its-search-supersymmetry
Leave a Reply