Probing SUSY beyond the reach of LEP2 at the Fermilab Tevatron: low |M_3| dark matter models

Abstract

In supersymmetric models where the magnitude of the GUT scale gaugino mass parameter M_3 is suppressed relative to M_1 and M_2, the lightest neutralino can be a mixed higgsino-bino state with a thermal relic abundance in agreement with the WMAP central value for \Omega_{\rm CDM} h^2 and consistent with all other phenomenological constraints. In these models, the gluino can be as light as 200 GeV without conflicting with the LEP2 bounds on the chargino mass. Thus, gluino pair production can be accessible at the Fermilab Tevatron at high rates. In this framework, gluinos decay radiatively with a large branching fraction to a gluon plus a neutralino. We find that experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron, with 5 fb^{-1} of integrated luminosity, will be sensitive to gluino pair production in the m_{\tg}\sim 200-350 GeV range via the multi-jet +etmissing and multi-jet +\ell^+\ell^- + etmissing channels at the 5\sigma level, while trilepton signatures are expected to be below this level of detectability. Dilepton mass edges from both \tz_2 and \tz_3 decays may be measurable in the dilepton + multi-jet +etmissing channel.