Cornering Light Stops with Dileptonic mT2
Supersymmetric spectra with a stop NLSP and a neutralino or gravitino LSP present a special challenge for collider searches. For stop pairs directly produced from QCD, the visible final-state particles are identical to those of top quark pair production, giving very similar kinematics but often with much smaller rates. The situation is exacerbated for compressed spectra with m(stop) ~ m(top) + m(LSP), as well as for lighter stops which can suffer from low acceptance efficiencies. In this note, we explore the power of a direct stop search using dileptonic mT2, similar to the one recently performed by ATLAS, but more optimized to cover these difficult regions of the (m(stop),m(LSP)) plane. Our study accounts for the effects of stop chirality and LSP identity, which can be significant. In particular, our estimates suggest that m(stop) ~ m(top) with a massless LSP is excludable for right-handed stops with bino-like (gravitino) LSP with 2012 (2011) data, but remains largely unobservable in the case of a higgsino-like singlino LSP. For each of these cases we map out the regions of parameter space that can be excluded with 2012 data, as well as currently allowed regions that would yield discovery-level significance. We also comment on the prospects of a precision mT2 shape measurement, and consider the potential of ATLAS's dileptonic stop -> b chi^+ searches when re-interpreted for light stops decaying directly to the LSP.