e+ e- Cross Section and Exclusion of Massless Electroweak Gauginos

Abstract

Measurements of the total hadronic cross section in e+e- annihilation are shown to be capable of severely limiting the possibility that gauginos have negligible tree level masses. A combined analysis of 1997 and earlier LEP data, considering simultaneously conventional SUSY signatures and purely hadronic final states, should achieve a 95% cl sensitivity to the case that the SU(2) and U(1) gauginos are massless. If integrated luminosity targets are achieved, it should also be possible to exclude the case that the wino or wino and gluino are light while the bino is heavy, except possibly for a small region of mu, tan beta. The analysis applies whether or not R-parity is conserved, and can also be used to reduce the model-dependence of conventional SUSY searches.