Abstract
LHC experiments have placed strong bounds on the production of supersymmetric
colored particles (squarks and gluinos), under the assumption that all flavors
of squarks are nearly degenerate. However, the current experimental constraints
on stop squarks are much weaker, due to the smaller production cross section
and difficult backgrounds. While light stops are motivated by naturalness
arguments, it has been suggested that such particles become nearly impossible
to detect near the limit where their mass is degenerate with the sum of the
masses of their decay products. We show that this is not the case, and that
searches based on missing transverse energy (MET) have significant reach for
stop masses above 175 GeV, even in the degenerate limit. We consider direct
pair production of stops, decaying to invisible LSPs and tops with either
hadronic or semi-leptonic final states. Modest intrinsic differences in MET are
magnified by boosted kinematics and by shape analyses of MET or suitably-chosen
observables related to MET. For these observables we show that the
distributions of the relevant backgrounds and signals are well-described by
simple analytic functions, in the kinematic regime where signal is enhanced.
Shape analyses of MET-related distributions will allow the LHC experiments to
place significantly improved bounds on stop squarks, even in scenarios where
the stop-LSP mass difference is degenerate with the top mass. Assuming 20/fb of
luminosity at 8 TeV, we conservatively estimate that experiments can exclude or
discover degenerate stops with mass as large as ~ 360 GeV and 560 GeV for
massless LSPs.