Dark Matter as a Guide Toward a Light Gluino at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential for detecting a light gluino and wino-like dark matter at the LHC, connecting collider signals with dark matter observations and constraints from astrophysical data.

Contribution

It introduces a model with a light gluino and wino-like LSP, analyzing its collider signatures and dark matter implications, which differ from traditional models with wino-dominated LSPs.

Findings

Early discovery prospects for gluinos at the LHC with low luminosity.

Large event rates from gluino three-body decays in certain parameter regions.

Compatibility with dark matter relic abundance and astrophysical constraints.

Abstract

Motivated by specific connections to dark matter signatures, we study the prospects of observing the presence of a relatively light gluino whose mass is in the range ~(500-900) GeV with a wino-like lightest supersymmetric particle with mass in the range of ~(170-210) GeV. The light gaugino spectra studied here is generally different from other models, and in particular those with a wino dominated LSP, in that here the gluinos can be significantly lighter. The positron excess reported by the PAMELA satellite data is accounted for by annihilations of the wino LSP and their relic abundance can generally be brought near the WMAP constraints due to the late decay of a modulus field re-populating the density of relic dark matter. We also mention the recent FERMI photon constraints on annihilating dark matter in this class of models and implications for direct detection experiments including CDMS and XENON. We study these signatures in models of supersymmetry with non-minimal soft breaking terms derived from both string compactifications and related supergravity models which generally lead to non-universal gaugino masses. At the LHC, large event rates from the three-body decays of the gluino in certain parts of the parameter space are found to give rise to early discovery prospects for the gaugino sector. Excess events at the 5 sigma level can arise with luminosity as low as order 100 pb^{-1} at a center of mass energy of 10 TeV and less than ~ 1 fb^{-1} at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV.