Searching for long-lived light neutralinos from $B$-meson decays with baryonic R-parity violation at Belle II

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of Belle II to detect long-lived light neutralinos produced in B-meson decays via baryonic R-parity violation, introducing a new partial-reconstruction technique for improved sensitivity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel partial-reconstruction method and detailed sensitivity analysis for detecting long-lived neutralinos with displaced vertices at Belle II.

Findings

Belle II can probe RPV couplings beyond current bounds.

The new technique improves detection efficiency for long-lived particles.

Sensitivity estimates show potential to explore new parameter space.

Abstract

In a supersymmetry scenario with R-parity violation (RPV), neutralinos with GeV-scale mass, which are necessarily bino-like, are allowed by all constraints and can be produced in association with a baryon in $B$-meson decays via certain $\bar U \bar D \bar D$ operators. In this work, we investigate this scenario with two non-vanishing RPV couplings at the low-energy scale. With one RPV coupling governing the neutralino production rate and another determining its lifetime, this scenario can lead to observable signals with displaced-vertex signatures in the tracking volume of $B$-factories. To maximize the sensitivity to such signals, we develop a new partial-reconstruction technique that yields high efficiency and utilizes most of the decays of relatively heavy, long-lived particles, achieving much better sensitivity than standard full reconstruction. We consider potential background sources and devise selection criteria to suppress their event yields to very low levels. Using a parameterized model of the detector, we estimate in detail the displaced-vertex reconstruction efficiency as a function of neutralino lifetime and mass. For squark masses beyond the LHC limits, we calculate the signal sensitivity of Belle~II, showing that the experiment can probe the RPV couplings well beyond the present bounds, obtained from searches for dinucleon decays, baryon-antibaryon oscillations, and $B^+\to p +\text{missing}$.