Hunting long-lived gluinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to detect long-lived gluinos, which form R-hadrons, through distinctive air shower signatures at the Pierre Auger Observatory, using detailed Monte Carlo simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed simulation framework to identify unique air shower features caused by long-lived gluinos, aiding their detection in cosmic ray experiments.

Findings

R-hadron air showers differ significantly from standard particle showers.

Distinct observables can be used to identify long-lived gluinos.

Detection requires cosmic ray energies above 10^{13.6} GeV.

Abstract

Eventual signals of split sypersymmetry in cosmic ray physics are analyzed in detail. The study focusses particularly on quasi-stable colorless R-hadrons originating through confinement of long-lived gluinos (with quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons) produced in pp collisions at astrophysical sources. Because of parton density requirements, the gluino has a momentum which is considerable smaller than the energy of the primary proton, and so production of heavy (mass ~ 500 GeV) R-hadrons requires powerful cosmic ray engines able to accelerate particles up to extreme energies, somewhat above 10^{13.6} GeV. Using a realistic Monte Carlo simulation with the AIRES engine, we study the main characteristics of the air showers triggered when one of these exotic hadrons impinges on a stationary nucleon of the Earth atmosphere. We show that R-hadron air showers present clear differences with respect to those initiated by standard particles. We use this shower characteristics to construct observables which may be used to distinguish long-lived gluinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory.