Supersymmetry Reach of Tevatron Upgrades: The Large $\tan\beta$ Case

Abstract

The Yukawa couplings of the tau lepton and the bottom quark become comparable to, or even exceed, electroweak gauge couplings for large values of the SUSY parameter $\tan\beta$. As a result, the lightest tau slepton $\ttau_1$ and bottom squark $\tb_1$ can be significantly lighter than corresponding sleptons and squarks of the first two generations. Gluino, chargino and neutralino decays to third generation particles are significantly enhanced when $\tan\beta$ is large. This affects projections for collider experiment reach for supersymmetric particles. In this paper, we evaluate the reach of the Fermilab Tevatron $p\bar p$ collider for supersymmetric signals in the framework of the mSUGRA model. We find that the reach via signatures with multiple isolated leptons ($e$ and $\mu$) is considerably reduced. For very large $\tan\beta$, the greatest reach is attained in the multi-jet$+\eslt$ signature. Some significant extra regions may be probed by requiring the presence of an identified $b$-jet in jets$+\eslt$ events, or by requiring one of the identified leptons in clean trilepton events to actually be a hadronic 1 or 3 charged prong tau. In an appendix, we present formulae for chargino, neutralino and gluino three body decays which are valid at large $\tan\beta$.