Impact of squark generation mixing on the search for gluinos at LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how squark generation mixing influences gluino decay patterns in the MSSM, revealing significant effects on decay branching ratios and invariant mass distributions, which can aid LHC searches for supersymmetry.

Contribution

It demonstrates that squark generation mixing can substantially alter gluino decay signatures and invariant mass distributions, providing new avenues for supersymmetry detection at LHC.

Findings

Gluino decay branching ratios can reach up to 50% for QFV channels.

Multiple-edge structures in charm-top invariant mass distributions can occur.

Squark mixing effects are significant despite strong flavor violation constraints.

Abstract

We study gluino decays in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with squark generation mixing. We show that the effect of this mixing on the gluino decay branching ratios can be very large in a significant part of the MSSM parameter space despite the very strong experimental constraints on quark flavour violation (QFV) from B meson observables. Especially we find that under favourable conditions the branching ratio of the the QFV gluino decay gluino -> c bar{t} (bar{c} t) + neutralino_1 can be as large as about 50%. We also find that the squark generation mixing can result in a multiple-edge (3- or 4-edge) structure in the charm-top quark invariant mass distribution. The appearance of this remarkable structure provides an additional powerful test of supersymmetric QFV at LHC. These could have an important impact on the search for gluinos and the determination of the MSSM parameters at LHC.