The Light Gluino Gap

TL;DR

This paper investigates a specific mass range gap in experimental searches for light gluinos decaying into multiple light-flavor quarks, using UA2 data, and identifies additional unexplored decay scenarios.

Contribution

It provides the strongest current limits on gluinos with 51-76 GeV decaying into three jets and highlights additional gaps for higher multiplicity decays.

Findings

UA2 data sets the strongest limit on gluino->jjj in the 51-76 GeV range.

Current searches do not cover gluino decays into four or more partons for masses 51-300 GeV.

Gaps remain in experimental coverage for certain light gluino decay modes.

Abstract

A variety of experimental searches and theoretical efforts have constrained gluinos that undergo an all-hadronic decay with no missing energy, as can arise in R-parity violating or stealth supersymmetry. Although the gluino->jj decay is robustly excluded, there is gap in current experimental coverage for gluinos with masses between 51-76 GeV that decay into three light-flavor quarks. In this work, we probe this gap with published multi-jet data from the UA2 experiment. Despite setting the strongest current limit on this region, we find that UA2 data is unable to close this gap for gluino->jjj decays. In addition to this three-jet gap, we note an additional gap for all-hadronic gluino -> n parton decays with $n\geq 4$ for light gluinos (51 GeV < m < 300 GeV) not covered by the current search program.