Flavour violating gluino three-body decays at LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how squark generation mixing in the MSSM can cause significant quark-flavour violating gluino three-body decays at the LHC, potentially affecting gluino search strategies.

Contribution

It demonstrates that quark-flavour violating gluino decays can have large branching ratios despite experimental constraints, highlighting their importance in LHC gluino searches.

Findings

QFV gluino decay BRs can reach ~40% for $gl -> c tbar neut_1$

QFV decay BRs are sensitive to squark, neutralino, and chargino parameters

QFV signatures like $pp -> t t cbar cbar E_T^miss$ can be significant at LHC

Abstract

We study the effect of squark generation mixing on gluino production and decays at LHC in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) for the case that the gluino is lighter than all squarks and dominantly decays into three particles, $gl -> q qbar neut_k, gl -> q qbar' char_l$. We assume mixing between the second and the third squark generations in the up-type and down-type squark sectors. We show that this mixing can lead to very large branching ratios of the quark-flavour violating gluino three-body decays despite the strong constraints on quark-flavour violation (QFV) from the experimental data on B mesons. We also show that the QFV gluino decay branching ratios are very sensitive not only to the generation mixing in the squark sector, but also to the parameters of the neutralino and chargino sectors. We show that the branching ratio of the QFV gluino decay $gl -> c tbar (cbar t) neut_1$ can go up to ~ 40%. Analogously, that of the QFV decay $gl -> s bbar (sbar b) neut_1$ can reach ~35%. We find that the rates of the resulting QFV signatures, such as $pp -> t t cbar cbar E_T^mis$, can be significant at LHC. This could have an important influence on the gluino searches at LHC.