This paper presents a search for the pair production of top squarks in events with a single isolated electron or muon, jets, large missing transverse momentum, and large transverse mass. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 fb −1 of pp collisions collected in 2012 by the CMS experiment at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of √ s = 8 TeV. No significant excess in data is observed above the expectation from standard model processes. The results are interpreted in the context of supersymmetric models with pair production of top squarks that decay either to a top quark and a neutralino or to a bottom quark and a chargino. For small mass values of the lightest supersymmetric particle, top-squark mass values up to around 650 GeV are excluded.Published in the European Physical Journal C as doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-013-2677-2.
IntroductionThe standard model (SM) has been extremely successful at describing particle physics phenomena. However, it suffers from such shortcomings as the hierarchy problem, where fine-tuned cancellations of large quantum corrections are required in order for the Higgs boson to have a mass at the electroweak symmetry breaking scale of order 100 GeV [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Supersymmetry (SUSY) is a popular extension of the SM that postulates the existence of a superpartner for every SM particle, with the same quantum numbers but differing by one half-unit of spin. SUSY potentially provides a "natural", i.e., not fine-tuned, solution to the hierarchy problem through the cancellations of the quadratic divergences of the top-quark and top-squark loops. In addition, it provides a connection to cosmology, with the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP), if neutral and stable, serving as a dark matter candidate in R-parity conserving SUSY models. This paper describes a search for the pair production of top squarks using the full dataset collected at √ s = 8 TeV by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment [7] at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during 2012, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 fb −1 . This search is motivated by the consideration that relatively light top squarks, with masses below around 1 TeV, are necessary if SUSY is to be the natural solution to the hierarchy problem [8][9][10][11][12]. These constraints are especially relevant given the recent discovery of a particle that closely resembles a Higgs boson, with a mass of ∼125 GeV [13][14][15]. Searches for top-squark pair production have also been performed by the ATLAS Collaboration at the LHC in several final states [16][17][18][19][20], and by the CDF [21] and D0 [22] Collaborations at the Tevatron.The search presented here focuses on two decay modes of the top squark ( t): t → t χ 0 1 and t → b χ + . These modes are expected to have large branching fractions if kinematically allowed. Here t and b are the top and bottom quarks, and the neutralinos ( χ 0 ) and charginos ( χ ± ) are the mass eigenstates formed by the linear combination of the gauginos and higgsinos, which are the fermi...