Signatures of Virtual LSPs at the Tevatron

Abstract

Relatively light sneutrinos which are experimentally allowed and are not theoretically disfavoured may significantly affect the currently popular search strategies for supersymmetric particles by decaying dominantly into an invisible channel. In certain cases the second lightest neutralino may also decay invisibly leading to two extra carriers of missing energy (in addition to the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) ) - the virtual LSPs (VLSPs). The lighter charginos which would be produced in pairs with reasonably large cross-sections at TEVATRON energies, decay dominantly into the hadronically quiet lepton + sneutrino ($\not{E_T}$ ) modes with large branching ratios leading to interesting unlike sign dilepton events which are not swamped by the standard model background. The kinematical cuts required to eliminate the backgrounds from WW, Drell-Yan and $\tau$ pair production are discussed in detail. With 100 $pb^{-1}$ luminosity 10 - 35 background free events can be found in a large region of the SUSY parameter space.