Search for nearly degenerate higgsinos via photon fusion with the semileptonic channel at the LHC

Electroweak scale higgsinos with a nearly degenerate spectrum in supersymmetric models are well-motivated, but generally less constrained at collider experiments as the decay products are often too soft to detect. Initial photon fusions alongside the collision of protons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have drawn attention recently as a way to search for new physics with such kind of spectra. In this paper, we demonstrate a search strategy for chargino pair production from photon fusion p p → p ( γ γ → χ ˜ 1 + χ ˜ 1 − ) p at the 13 TeV LHC via the semileptonic decay channel, as a probe for the compressed spectra of higgsinos. Forward detectors make it possible to detect the outgoing protons after emitting the initial photons in these processes. We here provide simple event selections on missing energy and transverse momentum of leptons, which are effective enough to reach significant sensitivity. The chargino mass can be excluded at 95% C.L. up to about 295 GeV with the mass difference Δ m ( χ ˜ 1 ± , χ ˜ 1 0 ) being only a few GeV with the integrated luminosity of 3 ab −1 . With a relatively small luminosity of 100 fb −1 , the 2 σ exclusion bounds can as well exceed current experimental limits in the range of Δ m = 1 ∼ 2 GeV, reaching over 190 GeV for chargino mass.