Gluino polarization at the LHC

Abstract

Gluinos are produced pairwise at the LHC in quark-antiquark and gluon-gluon collisions: $q\overline{q}$, $gg\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\stackrel{\texttildelow{}}{g}\stackrel{\texttildelow{}}{g}$. While the individual polarization of gluinos vanishes in the limit in which the small mass difference between $L$ and $R$ squarks of the first two generations is neglected, nonzero spin-spin correlations are predicted within gluino pairs. If the squark/quark charges in Majorana gluino decays are tagged, the spin correlations have an impact on the energy and angular distributions in reconstructed final states. On the other hand, the gluino polarization in single gluino production in the supersymmetric Compton process $gq\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\stackrel{\texttildelow{}}{g}{\stackrel{\texttildelow{}}{q}}_{R,L}$ is predicted to be nonzero, and the polarization affects the final-state distributions in super-Compton events.