Signals for Supersymmetry at HERA

Abstract

We consider the baryon parity signals at HERA for the case of the MSSM production mechanisms and the decays via the lepton number violating couplings $L_iQ{\bar D}$. We can probe very small Yukawa couplings $\lam' \gsim 3\cdot 10^{-6}$, limited only by the decay length of the LSP. We assume the LSP to be the lightest neutralino and study its decays in detail. We present the matrix element squared for the tree-level decay amplitude of a generally mixed neutralino explicitly. We find that the branching fraction to charged leptons strongly depends on the SUSY parameters and can differ significantly from the naively expected $50\%$. The SUSY mass reaches of the studied processes in the ZEUS detector at HERA were found to be: $(m({\tilde e}, {\tilde \nu})+m({\tilde q}))\leq 170\gev$, $195\gev$ and $205\gev$ for the $L_\tau Q{\bar D}, L_\mu Q{\bar D}$ and $L_e Q{\bar D}$ couplings respectively. These are well above existing limits on R-parity violating (\rpv) SUSY from previous experiments. We conclude that HERA offers a {\it very promising} discovery potential for \rpv\ SUSY.