Searching for Long-Lived Supersymmetric Particles with the ATLAS Experiment

Most efforts to find supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider focus on models in which supersymmetric particles produced in proton-proton collisions either promptly decay into Standard Model particles, or traverse the entire detector without decaying or interacting. However, supersymmetric particles could have lifetimes that are significant on the detector scale. These particles would have unusual signatures in the detector and could easily evade detection by analyses designed to search for prompt decays of new particles. In this talk, I will present the searches by the ATLAS experiment for supersymmetric particles with significant lifetimes. After an overview of the different signatures and experimental techniques used to perform these searches, I will focus on one recent result. I will also summarize the upgrade to the ATLAS Pixel detector that was performed for Run 2, and discuss some of the challenges of this upgrade as well as its role in improving the search for long-lived particles.