Perspectives for the detection and measurement of supersymmetry in the focus point region of mSUGRA models with the ATLAS detector at LHC

This paper discusses the ATLAS potential to study Supersymmetry for the "Focus-Point" region of the parameter space of mSUGRA models. The potential to discovery a deviation from Standard Model expectations with the first few ${fb}^{-1}$ of LHC data was studied using the parametrized simulation of the ATLAS detector. Several signatures were considered, involving hard jets, large missing energy, and either $b$-tagged jets, opposite-sign isolated electron or muon pairs, or top quarks reconstructed exploiting their fully hadronic decays. With only 1 ${fb}^{-1}$ of data each of these signatures may allow to observe an excess of events over Standard Model expectation with a statistical significance exceeding 5 standard deviations. An analytical expression was derived for the shape of the distribution of the dilepton invariant mass arising from the three-body leptonic decay of the neutralinos under the hypothesis of heavy scalars, which is appropriate for the focus-point scenario. The resulting function was used to fit the distribution of the dilepton invariant mass obtained with simulated LHC data, and to extract the value of two kinematic endpoints measuring the $\tilde \chi^0_2 - \tilde \chi^0_1$ and the $\tilde \chi^0_3 - \tilde \chi^0_1$ mass differences. This information was used to constrain the MSSM parameter space compatible with the data.