More energy, more searches, but the phenomenological MSSM lives on

We further examine the capability of the 7 and 8 TeV LHC to explore the parameter space of the phenomenological Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (pMSSM) with neutralino lightest supersymmetric particles. Here we present an updated study employing all of the relevant ATLAS supersymmetry (SUSY) analyses, as well as all relevant LHC non-missing-transverse-energy searches, whose data were publically available as of mid-September 2012. We find that roughly 1/3 of our pMSSM model points, and 38% of the points with colored sparticles below 1 TeV, are excluded at present. An important role in excluding these models is being played by both the heavy-flavor and multilepton searches, as well as those for heavy stable charged particles. Nonetheless, we find that light gluinos, first/second generation squarks, and top squark/sbottoms (of order 400-700 GeV), as well as models with low fine-tuning (of order 1% according to the Barbieri-Giudice measure), are still viable in the pMSSM. In addition, we see that increased luminosity at 8 TeV is unlikely to significantly improve the reach of the standard jets + MET searches. The impact of these null searches on the SUSY sparticle spectrum is discussed in detail and the implications of these results for models with low fine-tuning, a future lepton collider and dark matter searches are examined.