UC Santa Barbara

This thesis describes a search for supersymmetry in events with a single lepton, large jet multiplicity, multiple b jets, and significant transverse momentum imbalance in 19.3 fb^-1 of pp collisions at center of mass energy of 8 TeV recorded in 2012 by the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. This signature targets strongly produced massive gluinos which decay through top squarks. The observed yields in the signal regions, spanning a broad range of event kinematics, agree with the Standard Model background predictions, which are obtained with a heavy reliance on data control samples. The results of this search are interpreted as cross section limits in the context of simplified supersymmetric scenarios in which gluinos are pair produced and cascade decay to a four top quark, two lightest neutralino final state. By comparing these limits with gluino pair production cross sections, gluinos with mass less than 1 TeV are excluded for low lightest neutralino masses, largely independent of top squark mass.