is organized as follows. In section \[sec:DrellYan\] we examine the DY process, discussing the criteria for observing stau pairs and for distinguishing them from the background. This allows us to derive the LHC’s discovery reach and exclusion potential in section \[sec:Discovery\]. In section \[sec:production\] we briefly compare DY production with the production of staus from the decay of heavier superparticles. The purpose of this consideration is to estimate for which SUSY spectra the exclusion limit from direct DY production is tight and for which spectra it tends to be overly loose. We will see that the direct DY production can be dominant for large mass gaps between the stau NLSP and the colored superparticles. Unless noted otherwise, we discuss the $14{\ensuremath{\,\textnormal{TeV}}}$ LHC run in what follows.

Staus from the Drell-Yan process {#sec:DrellYan}
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Let us first discuss in detail the DY production of staus, the expected signal in a detector at the LHC and the background suppression. All events have been generated with <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">MadGraph/MadEvent 4</span> [@alwall-2007] and its <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Pythia</span> [@sjostrand-2006-0605] interface. For the event generation in <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">MadEvent</span> and <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Pythia</span> we enabled the MLM matching scheme [@alwall-2008-53]. The <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Cteq6l1</span> PDF set [@Pumplin:2002vw] has been used.

Background 