Prompt Decays of General Neutralino NLSPs at the Tevatron

TL;DR

This paper investigates the collider signatures of gauge mediation models with a general neutralino NLSP at the Tevatron, analyzing current search capabilities and proposing optimizations for future discovery potential.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of final states from neutralino NLSP decays and evaluates Tevatron's sensitivity, suggesting new search strategies for improved detection.

Findings

Tevatron can potentially detect neutralino NLSP decays involving photons, Z, W, and Higgs bosons.

Existing searches have limited sensitivity but can be optimized for better reach.

Future LHC searches could significantly enhance discovery prospects.

Abstract

Recent theoretical developments have shown that gauge mediation has a much larger parameter space of possible spectra and mixings than previously considered. Motivated by this, we explore the collider phenomenology of gauge mediation models where a general neutralino is the lightest MSSM superpartner (the NLSP), focusing on the potential reach from existing and future Tevatron searches. Promptly decaying general neutralino NLSPs can give rise to final states involving missing energy plus photons, Zs, Ws and/or Higgses. We survey the final states and determine those where the Tevatron should have the most sensitivity. We then estimate the reach of existing Tevatron searches in these final states and discuss new searches (or optimizations of existing ones) that should improve the reach. Finally we comment on the potential for discovery at the LHC.