Extensive Air Showers from Ultra High Energy Gluinos

Abstract

We study the proposal that the cosmic ray primaries above the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff are gluino-containing hadrons ($\tilde{g}$-hadrons). We describe the interaction of $\tilde{g}$-hadrons with nucleons in the framework of the Gribov-Regge approach using a modified version of the hadronic interaction model QGSJET for the generations of Extensive Air Showers (EAS). There are two mass windows marginally allowed for gluinos: $m_{\tilde{g}}\text{lsim}3$ GeV and $25\text{lsim}{m}_{\tilde{g}}\text{lsim}35$ GeV. Gluino-containing hadrons corresponding to the second window produce EAS very different from the observed ones. Light $\tilde{g}$-hadrons corresponding to the first gluino window produce EAS similar to those initiated by protons, and only future detectors can marginally distinguish them. We propose a beam-dump accelerator experiment to search for $\tilde{g}$-hadrons in this mass window. We emphasize the importance of this experiment: it can discover (or exclude) the light gluino and its role as a cosmic ray primary at ultra high energies.

Comments: 27 pages latex, 13 eps figures