Testing Gaugino Mass Unification Directly at the LHC

We report on the first step of a systematic study of how gaugino mass unification can be probed at the CERN LHC in a quasi-model independent manner. Here we focus our attention on the theoretically well-motivated mirage pattern of gaugino masses, a one-parameter family of models of which universal (high scale) gaugino masses are a limiting case. Using a statistical method to optimize our signature selection we arrive at three ensembles of observables targeted at the physics of the gaugino sector, allowing for a determination of this non-universality parameter without reconstructing individual mass eigenvalues or the soft supersymmetry-breaking gaugino masses themselves. In this controlled environment we find that approximately 80% of the supersymmetric parameter space would give rise to a model for which our method will detect non-universality in the gaugino mass sector at the 10% level with O(10fb−1) of integrated luminosity.