Searches for Tau Sleptons

Supersymmetry is a hypothetical extension of the Standard Model of particle physics which helps answer a number of open questions arising from our current understanding of the workings of the universe at the fundamental level. In its minimal implementation, this additional postulated symmetry between fermions and bosons predicts the existence a host of new particles which are the focus of an extensive search program at the Large Hadron Collider. In this talk, an overview is presented of the progress made by searches which look for either direct production of scalar tau leptons or production of supersymmetric particles which are assumed to decay through scalar tau leptons. The decays of scalar tau leptons to their Standard Model partners lead to challenging experimental signatures, requiring dedicated reconstruction algorithms which are usually based on machine-learning techniques. The latest results from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations are presented, making use of the large dataset of proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s} = 13~$TeV provided by the Large Hadron Collider.