Discovery potential for supersymmetry in CMS*

This work summarizes and puts in an overall perspective studies done within CMS concerning the discovery potential for squarks and gluinos, sleptons, charginos and neutralinos, SUSY dark matter, lightest Higgs, sparticle mass determination methods and the detector design optimisation in view of SUSY searches. It represents the status of our understanding of these subjects as of Summer 1997. As a benchmark model we used the minimal supergravity-inspired super- symmetric standard model (mSUGRA) with a stable LSP. Discovery of SUSY at the LHC should be relatively straightforward. It may occur through the observation of a large excesses of events in missing E_T + jets, or with one or more isolated leptons. An excess of trilepton events or of isolated dileptons with E_T^miss, exhibiting a characteristic signature in the l^+l^- invariant mass distribution could also be the first manifestation of SUSY production. Squark and gluino production may represent a copious source of Higgs bosons through cascade decays. The lightest SUSY Higgs h->bbbar may be reconstructed with a signal/background ratio of order 1. The lightest supersymmetric particle of SUSY models with conserved R-parity represents a very good candidate for the cosmological dark matter. The region of parameter space where this is true is well-covered by our searches, at least for tan(beta)=2. If supersymmetry exists at electroweak scale it could hardly escape detection in CMS, and the study of supersymmetry will form a central part of our physics program.