Probing light neutralinos from pair-produced sleptons with displaced vertices at the high-luminosity LHC

• Published in: The journal of high energy physics Vol. 2025; no. 9; pp. 102 - 19
• Main Authors: Cottin, Giovanna, Helo, Juan Carlos, Hernández-Pinto, Fabián, Neill, Nicolás A., Wang, Zeren Simon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 11.09.2025; Springer Nature B.V; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Apexes; Classical and Quantum Gravitation; Couplings; Elementary Particles; Fermions; Large Hadron Collider; Luminosity; New Light Particles; Numerical analysis; Pair production; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Quantum Field Theories; Quantum Field Theory; Quantum Physics; Regular Article - Theoretical Physics; Relativity Theory; String Theory; Supersymmetry; Supersymmetry; New Light Particles
• ISSN: 1029-8479; 1029-8479
• DOI: 10.1007/JHEP09(2025)102

A bstract We study light neutralinos χ ~ 1 0 with masses ranging from 10 GeV to several hundred GeV within the framework of R-parity-violating (RPV) supersymmetry. These light neutralinos can be long-lived, decaying with a macroscopic displacement (order cm) inside the LHC main detectors. Complementing previous works on the subject, here we focus on their production through the electroweak pair production of left-chiral sleptons e ~ L , with the signal process pp → e ~ L + e ~ L − → e + χ ~ 1 0 e − χ ~ 1 0 . In contrast to the previous study with a singly produced slepton, where the RPV coupling λ 111 ′ induces both the production and decay of the light neutralino, in our scenario the production proceeds through Drell-Yan-like processes that are essentially independent of RPV couplings. Correspondingly, we implement a displaced-vertex search strategy for which our numerical analysis shows that the high-luminosity LHC can probe λ 111 ′ values up to three orders of magnitude smaller, and neutralino masses up to about four times larger than those accessible in the previously studied single-slepton production scenario.