The footprint of F-theory at the LHC

Recent work has shown that compactifications of F-theory provide a potentially attractive phenomenological scenario. The low energy characteristics of F-theory GUTs consist of a deformation away from a minimal gauge mediation scenario with a high messenger scale. The soft scalar masses of the theory are all shifted by a stringy effect which survives to low energies. This effect can range from 0 GeV up to ∼ 500 GeV. In this paper we study potential collider signatures of F-theory GUTs, focussing in particular on ways to distinguish this class of models from other theories with an MSSM spectrum. To accomplish this, we have adapted the general footprint method developed recently for distinguishing broad classes of string vacua to the specific case of F-theory GUTs. We show that with only 5 fb-1 of simulated LHC data, it is possible to distinguish many mSUGRA models and low messenger scale gauge mediation models from F-theory GUTs. Moreover, we find that at 5 fb-1, the stringy deformation away from minimal gauge mediation produces observable consequences which can also be detected to a level of order ∼ ±80 GeV. In this way, it is possible to distinguish between models with a large and small stringy deformation. At 50 fb-1, this improves to ∼ ±10 GeV.