Blinded by the Light: An HL-LHC Extrapolation of the Run 2 SUSY Electroweak Analysis Ending in Fully Hadronic Final States

This thesis presents the prospects of a search for charginos and neutralinos using fully hadronic final states and missing transverse momentum at the HL-LHC, assuming an integrated luminosity of 3 ab−1 and a center-of-mass energy of √s = 14 TeV. This search focuses on pair produced electroweakinos that decay into a high-pT gauge or Higgs boson and a neutral stable particle that escapes the detector. Fully hadronic decay modes of W /Z/Higgs bosons are exploited for their large branching ratio and highly efficient background rejection by identifying high-pT bosons using large-radius jets and jet substructure information. The results are presented as expected 95% CL exclusion limits on the particle masses for each simplified model as well as 5σ discovery limits. A wino mass of up to 1560 GeV can be excluded depending on the mass of the bino, the lightest supersymmetric particle in this model. Similarly, a higgsino mass up to 1675 GeV can be excluded in the General Gauge Mediation model with a nearly massless gravitino as the lightest supersymmetric particle. The search is expected to achieve 5σ discovery potential over a wide range of masses that are not excluded by current searches using the LHC Run2 dataset.