HL-LHC sensitivity to higgsinos from natural SUSY with gravitino LSP

Abstract

In the realm of natural supersymmetric models, higgsinos are typically the lightest electroweakinos. In gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking models, the lightest higgsino-dominated particles decay into a $Z$-boson or a Higgs boson ($h$), along with an ultra-light gravitino ($\tilde{G}$) serving as the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). This scenario suggests a significant non-resonant $hh$ production. Basing on the recent global fitting results of the $\tilde{G}$-EWMSSM (MSSM with light electroweakinos and an eV-scale gravitino as the LSP) performed by the \textsf{GAMBIT} collaboration, which support a higgsino dominated electroweakino as light as 140 GeV, we develop two simplified models to evaluate their detection potential at the high-luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) with $\sqrt{s} = 14~{\rm TeV}$ and an integrated luminosity of $3000~{\rm fb}^{-1}$. The first model examines the processes where heavier higgsino-dominated states decay into soft $W/Z$ bosons, while the second focuses on direct decays of all three higgsino-dominated electroweakinos into $W/Z/h$ plus a $\tilde{G}$. Our study, incorporating both models and their distinct decay channels, utilizes detailed Monte Carlo simulations for signals and standard model backgrounds. We find that the HL-LHC can probe higgsinos up to 575 GeV, potentially discovering or excluding the natural SUSY scenario in the context of a gravitino LSP. Further, we reinterpret this discovery potential using the GAMBIT global fit samples, and find that the entire parameter space of $|\mu| \leq 500~{\rm GeV}$ with an electroweak fine-tuning measure ($\Delta_{\rm EW}$) under 100 in $\tilde{G}$-EWMSSM is accessible at the HL-LHC.