CMS reports a slight higgsino excess: no exclusions possible

The CMS collaboration at the LHC has released two new papers today (so far). One of them reinterprets some results on long-lived charged particles in pMSSM. The other one is arguably more interesting:

Search for electroweak production of higgsinos in channels with two Higgs bosons decaying to \(b\) quarks in \(pp\)-collisions at \(8\TeV\)

It is based on \(19.3/{\rm fb}\) of the 2012 data. They wanted to exclude the higgsinos with masses between \(270\) and \(350\GeV\). However, the exclusions couldn't be derived due to a "slight excess" of the relevant events. This is a seemingly exciting and surely unusual conclusion for an LHC paper – the LHC studies typically confirm the Standard Model with a precision that makes the Swiss watches look like a Soviet [anything].




However, when one looks at the data, one must agree that the excess is just "slight", indeed. The graphs I am going to show you are clearly not undeniable proofs of anything.




The relevant excess is seen in the \(4b\) sample, in the \(S_{\rm MET}\) bin 3. You may see it in the right part of their Figure 10:



The observed number of events is even larger than expected for the next-to-lightest neutralino at masses \(m_{\tilde \chi^1_0}=250\GeV\) and \(400\GeV\), too. For the \(4b\) sample bin 3 I mentioned, the SM background is\[

0.59^{+0.39+0.09}_{-0.26-0.09}

\] where the notation generalizes the usual \(\pm\) but with different deviations in the positive and negative direction. The upside deviation is the more relevant one and it is just \(0.40\) if you compute it in the Pythagorean way. Instead of this \(0.6\pm 0.4\), the experimenters actually observe 3 events. It's higher but 3 events is just too little to be stunned too much.



Figure 12 assures us that the overall excess isn't significant in any way, not even at a 2-sigma level. The observed black curve is safely within the green-plus-yellow band. The CMS needed to be somewhat lucky to get the black curve below the red line – and they were simply not lucky so no exclusions could have been derived.

This extra sober perspective is useful to understand that the word "excess" isn't something that should automatically impose a heart attack on you. Just to be sure, I am not saying that the higgsinos cannot be in the interval, either! ;-)