Gluino contributions to high-transverse-momentum hadron production at very high energies.

Abstract

We calculate the contributions to high-transverse-momentum pion production, in the present CERN p\ifmmode\bar\else\textasciimacron\fi{}p collider energy range and beyond, of all subprocesses involving at the partonic level lowest-order gluino interactions, in the framework of supersymmetric quantum chromodynamics (SQCD). We employ ${Q}^{2}$-dependent models for the gluino distribution and fragmentation functions, which are constructed in the SQCD Altarelli-Parisi framework. These are found to be very strongly peaked for small momentum fractions, where they can become comparable to the corresponding gluon functions, decreasing very rapidly as the momentum fraction approaches unity. The gluino mass is treated as a parameter: we present results at the indicative values m=2, 10, and 30 GeV. It is found that although gluino subinteractions give unimportant contributions to the inclusive production of ordinary hadrons at present collider energies, they increase considerably in the TeV energy range and may be unraveled by future experiments.