A meta-analysis of the 8 TeV ATLAS and CMS SUSY searches

Between the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the LHC, hundreds of individual event selections have been measured in the data to look for evidence of supersymmetry at a center of mass energy of 8 TeV. While there is currently no significant evidence for any particular model of supersymmetry, the large number of searches should have produced some large statistical fluctuations. By analyzing the distribution of p-values from the various searches, we determine that the number of excesses is consistent with the Standard Model only hypothesis. However, we do find a shortage of signal regions with far fewer observed events than expected in both the ATLAS and CMS datasets (at 1.66 sigma and 2.77 sigma, respectively, 3.23 sigma combined). While the lack of deficits could be a hint of new physics already in the 8 TeV datasets, it could also be the result of mis-modeling the uncertainty distributions or biases in background estimation methods.