Hunting long-lived gluinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory

Anchordoqui, Luis A.; Delgado, Antonio; Canal, Carlos A. Garcia; Sciutto, Sergio J.

Hunting long-lived gluinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory

Authors

Anchordoqui, Luis A.

Delgado, Antonio

Canal, Carlos A. Garcia

Sciutto, Sergio J.

Description

Eventual signals of split sypersymmetry in cosmic ray physics are analyzed in detail. The study focusses particularly on quasi-stable colorless R-hadrons originating through confinement of long-lived gluinos (with quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons) produced in pp collisions at astrophysical sources. Because of parton density requirements, the gluino has a momentum which is considerable smaller than the energy of the primary proton, and so production of heavy (mass ~ 500 GeV) R-hadrons requires powerful cosmic ray engines able to accelerate particles up to extreme energies, somewhat above 10^{13.6} GeV. Using a realistic Monte Carlo simulation with the AIRES engine, we study the main characteristics of the air showers triggered when one of these exotic hadrons impinges on a stationary nucleon of the Earth atmosphere. We show that R-hadron air showers present clear differences with respect to those initiated by standard particles. We use this shower characteristics to construct observables which may be used to distinguish long-lived gluinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory.
13 pages revtex, 9 eps figures. A ps version with high resolution figures is available at http://www.hep.physics.neu.edu/staff/doqui/rhadron_highres.ps