Phenomenology of Light Gauginos: I. Motivation, Masses, Lifetimes and Limits

Abstract

I explore an economical variant on supersymmetric standard models which may be indicated on cosmological grounds and is shown to have no SUSY-CP problem. Demanding radiative electroweak symmetry breaking suggests that the Higgs is light; other scalar masses may be ~ 100-200 GeV or less. In this case the gluino and photino, while massless at tree level, have 1-loop masses m(gluino) ~ 100 - 600 MeV and m(photino) ~ 100 - 1000 MeV. New hadrons with mass ~ 1 - 3 GeV are predicted and their lifetimes estimated. Existing experimental limits are discussed.