A Fat Gluino in Disguise

TL;DR

This paper explores how a large width-to-mass ratio of gluinos, as in GMSB scenarios, impacts their detection and property measurements at the LHC, revealing significant effects on mass and spin determination methods.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of how a 'fat' gluino with a sizeable width affects standard LHC detection and measurement techniques, including full spin correlations.

Findings

Sizeable width-to-mass ratios influence mass endpoint measurements.

Gluino width impacts discrimination between SUSY and UED models.

Full spin correlations are crucial for accurate property determination.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how a sizeable width-to-mass ratio for a gluino, as is for example realized in GMSB scenarios, could affect the discovery potential of gluinos at the LHC. More importantly, the influence of the gluino being "fat" on the standard mass and spin determination methods at the LHC are investigated. For this purpose, we focus on gluino production at the LHC, where we do not factorize the first step in the gluino decay cascade, but treat the following decay cascades step in factorization, including full spin correlations. The effects of sizeable width-to-mass ratios from a few up to 15-20 per cent on the endpoint of several mass determination methods as well as on means for discrimination between BSM spin paradigms like SUSY and UED are studied.