Gluino decays and experimental signatures

Abstract

Supersymmetry could be revealed by the discovery of gluinos, the supersymmetric partners of the gluons. Previously, it has been assumed that gluinos decay entirely into q (or gG if a goldstino G exists) where the photino is assumed to be the lightest supersymmetric particle. We point out that the could be competitive if there is sufficient mass splitting between the scalar partners of the left- ans right-handed quarks. We also consider four-body gluino decay modes which under certain conditions could dominate, and we relax the usual assumption of massless photinos. We discuss the phenomenological implications of these new modes and indicate the effects on possible experimental signatures of supersymmetry; when the g mode is large it greatly improves the possibilities for detecting gluinos in both collider and beam dump experiments, perhaps even allowing detection of individual events at colliders.