Searching for NLSP sbottom at the LHC

We study the collider phenomenology of sbottom-bino co-annihilation scenario at both the 7 TeV and 14 TeV LHC. This co-annihilation scenario requires that the NLSP sbottom and LSP bino masses are apart by no more than about 20% or so, and for Mb˜1>Mb+Mχ˜10, the sbottom decays exclusively into b+χ˜10. We propose a search for sbottom pairs through bb¯ plus missing energy. By scanning the mass parameters Mb˜1 and Mχ˜10, we investigate the discovery limits of sbottom and bino in the Mb˜1-Mχ˜10 plane with at least 5σ significance at the LHC, for varying integrated luminosities. It is shown that with at least 5 fb−1 luminosity, the 7 TeV LHC can explore a narrow region satisfying the 20% co-annihilation condition. For the 14 TeV LHC with 10 (100) fb−1 luminosity, the discovery limit of Mb˜1 is 360 (570) GeV.