A supersymmetric solution to the bottom-quark cross section anomaly

Abstract

In this talk, I describe a supersymmetric solution to the long-standing discrepancy between the bottom-quark production cross section and predictions of perturbative quantum chromodynamics. Pair production of light gluinos, of mass 12-16 GeV, with two-body decays into bottom quarks and bottom squarks, of mass 2-5.5 GeV, yields the correct normalizations and shapes of the measured bottom-quark distributions. One prediction of this scenario is that like-sign B mesons, B+B+ and B-B-, should be produced with a measurable rate at the next run of the Fermilab Tevatron Collider.