Sbottom signature of supersymmetric golden region

The experimental search limit on the Higgs boson mass points to a “golden region” in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model parameter space in which the fine-tuning in the electroweak sector is minimized. One of the sbottoms is relatively light since its mass parameter is related to that of the stop. The decay products of the light sbottom typically include a W boson and a b jet. We studied the pair production of the light sbottoms at the Large Hadron Collider and examined its discovery potential via collider signature of 4 jets + 1 lepton + missing E_T. Such channel differs from conventional sbottom searches of either b₁ → bχ⁰₂ → b^l+l−χ⁰₁ or b₁ → tχ⁻₁ with reconstructed top quark. We analyzed the Standard Model backgrounds for this channel and developed a set of cuts to identify the signal and suppress the backgrounds. We showed that with 100 fb⁻¹ integrated luminosity, a significance level of 5–6 σ could be reached for the light sbottom discovery at the LHC.