Searching for Directly Decaying Gluinos at the Tevatron

197 citations (182 excluding self-citations). A companion to the Jets+MET paper, focused specifically on the Tevatron and the striking result that gluinos could be as light as 125 GeV and still escape existing searches.

The Key Idea

Existing Tevatron searches for gluinos used cuts optimized for CMSSM spectra with large mass splittings between the gluino and the lightest neutralino. The paper demonstrates that for compressed spectra, where the mass splitting is small, these cuts throw away the signal. By optimizing H_T and MET cuts across the full kinematic parameter space, the search sensitivity expands to cover spectra that existing analyses miss entirely. The most dramatic finding: gluinos as light as 125 GeV were not excluded by any existing Tevatron search.

Impact

The 125 GeV gluino gap became a frequently cited example of how benchmark-driven searches can miss discoverable physics, motivating the broader program of model-independent search strategies developed in the Jets+MET, Sidewalk Ends, and Simplified Models papers. The paper was written with the same team (Alwall, Le, Lisanti, Wacker) and shares the same philosophy: present results in a form that covers the full parameter space rather than a few theoretically motivated benchmark points.

Recollections

[To be filled in.]

• DOI
• arXiv:0803.0019
• INSPIRE