Search for squarks and gluinos in events with hadronically decaying tau leptons, jets and missing transverse momentum in proton–proton collisions at √s=13 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector

A search for supersymmetry in events with large missing transverse momentum, jets, and at least one hadronically decaying tau lepton has been performed using 3.2 fb$^{-1}$ of proton–proton collision data at $\sqrt{s}=13{\mathrm {\ TeV}}$ recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2015. Two exclusive final states are considered, with either exactly one or at least two tau leptons. No excess over the Standard Model prediction is observed in the data. Results are interpreted in the context of gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking and a simplified model of gluino pair production with tau-rich cascade decays, substantially improving on previous limits. In the GMSB model considered, supersymmetry-breaking scale ( $\Lambda $ ) values below $92 {\mathrm {\ TeV}}$ are excluded at the 95% confidence level, corresponding to gluino masses below $2000 {\mathrm {\ GeV}}$ . For large values of $\tan \beta $ , values of $\Lambda $ up to $107 {\mathrm {\ TeV}}$ and gluino masses up to $2300 {\mathrm {\ GeV}}$ are excluded. In the simplified model, gluino masses are excluded up to $1570 {\mathrm {\ GeV}}$ for neutralino masses around $100 {\mathrm {\ GeV}}$ . Neutralino masses below $700 {\mathrm {\ GeV}}$ are excluded for all gluino masses between 800 and $1500 {\mathrm {\ GeV}}$ , while the strongest exclusion of $750 {\mathrm {\ GeV}}$ is achieved for gluino masses around $1450 {\mathrm {\ GeV}}$ .