Event generator comparison for SUSY discovery potential at the LHC

Full text: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will start its operation this fall, opening the path to new physics at an initial centre-of-mass energy of 10 TeV. Supersymmetry is a theory which proposes new heavy particles, the bosonic superpartners of the standard model fermions and fermionic superpartners of the standard model bosons. The search for such new particles is a major goal of the LHC. SUSY theories, however, have large parameter spaces, making it difficult to prepare for specific scenarios. While a generic minimal supersymmetric standard model consists of 105 free parameters, constrained model still have 5 free parameters. We must therefore scan these parameter spaces and generate Monte Carlo simulations for many choices thereof. This is done using a generator program, which in the case of ATLAS is Herwig(Isawig) for SUSY studies. In this talk, a comparison of particle-spectra stemming from supersymmetric events generated using Herwig(Isawig) and Pythia will be presented. It will be shown that the cross-sections need not be the same a priori for different generators, and its impact on the SUSY discovery potential with ATLAS will be highlighted. (author)