Model discrimination at the LHC: A case study

We investigate the potential of the compact muon solenoid detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to discriminate between two theoretical models predicting anomalous events with jets and large missing transverse energy, minimal supersymmetry, and little Higgs with $T$ parity. We focus on a simple test-case scenario, in which the only exotic particles produced at the LHC are heavy color-triplet states (squarks or $T$ quarks), and the only open decay channel for these particles is into the stable missing-energy particle (neutralino or heavy photon) plus a quark. We find that in this scenario, the angular and momentum distributions of the observed jets are sufficient to discriminate between the two models with a few inverse femtobarns of the LHC data, provided that these distributions for both models and the dominant standard model backgrounds can be reliably predicted by Monte Carlo simulations.