Light Gluinos in Four-Jet Events at LEP

Abstract

The light gluino hypothesis can explain the apparent incompatibility between the measurements of $\as$ at low- and high-energy. Such gluinos are produced directlyin four-jet events, for which we perform a detailed analysis. Because the jet energies are not large, the effect of the non-zero gluino mass is important. We take the gluino mass into account in the computation of the cross sections and shape variables. As expected, we find that mass effects tend to reduce the impact of the gluinos in the cross section, weakening the bounds from obtaining assuming massless gluinos.