We investigate the phenomenology of top squarks at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in a supersymmetric model where lepton number is identified with an approximate $U(1{)}_R$ symmetry in such a way that one of the left-chiral sneutrinos can acquire a large vacuum expectation value and can play the role of the down-type Higgs. This $R$ symmetry allows a subset of trilinear $R$-parity violating interactions, which determine the collider phenomenology of this model in a significant way. The gauginos are Dirac particles and gluinos are relatively heavy in this class of models. The model contains a right handed neutrino superfield, which gives a tree level mass to one of the active neutrinos. An order one neutrino Yukawa coupling also helps enhance the Higgs boson mass at the tree level and results in a very light bino-like neutralino (${\tilde{\chi }}_2^0$) with mass around a few hundred MeV, which is a carrier of missing (transverse) energy (${\cancel{E}}_T$). The model can accommodate two rather light top squarks, compatible with the observed mass of the Higgs boson. The lighter top squark (${\tilde{t}}_1$) can decay into $t{\tilde{\chi }}_2^0$, and thus the signal would be similar to the signal of top quark pair production at the LHC. In addition, fully visible decays such as ${\tilde{t}}_2\to b{e}^{+}$ can give rise to interesting final states. Such signals at the LHC combined with other features like a heavy gluino could provide strong evidence for this kind of a model. Our analysis shows that $m_{{\tilde{t}}_1}\lesssim 575(750)\mathrm{GeV}$ and $m_{{\tilde{t}}_2}\lesssim 1.2(1.4)\mathrm{TeV}$ can be probed with $5\sigma$ statistical significance at the 13 TeV LHC with $300(3000){\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity. Finally, we observe that in the presence of superlight carriers of ${\cancel{E}}_T$, the so-called “stealth” top squark scenario may naturally appear in our model.

• Received 4 September 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.93.075005