Impact of hadronic decays of the lightest neutralino on the reach of the CERN LHC

Abstract

If $R$-parity is not conserved, the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) could decay via lepton number violating or baryon number violating interactions. The latter case is particularly insidious since it leads to a reduction of the $\eslt$ as well as leptonic signals for supersymmetry. We evaluate cross sections for jets plus $\eslt$, 1$\ell$, $2\ell$ (same-sign and opposite sign) and $3\ell$ event topologies that result from the simultaneous production of all sparticles at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), assuming that the lightest supersymmetric particle $\tz_1$ decays hadronically inside the detector via $R$-parity violating interactions. We assume that these interactions do not affect the production rates or decays of other sparticles. We examine the SUSY reach of the LHC for this ``pessimistic'' scenario, and show that experiments at the LHC will still be able to search for gluinos and squarks as heavy as 1 TeV, given just 10 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity, even with cuts designed to explore the canonical SUSY framework with a {\it conserved} $R$-parity.