ANL–HEP–PR–96–43 UM–TH–96–06 May 1996 Do About Half the Top Quarks at FNAL Come From Gluino Decays? G. L. Kane† Randall Laboratory of Physics University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48104 and S. Mrenna‡ High Energy Physics Division Argonne National Laboratory Argonne, IL 60439 Abstract We argue that it is possible to make a consistent picture of FNAL data including the production and decay of gluinos and squarks. The additional cross section is several pb, about the size of that for Standard Model (SM) top quark pair production. If the stop squark mass is small enough, about half of the top quarks decay to stop squarks, and the loss of SM top quark pair production rate is compensated by the supersymmet- ric processes. This behavior is consistent with the reported top quark decay rates in various modes and other aspects of the data, and suggests several other possible decay signatures. This picture can be tested easily with more data, perhaps even with the data in hand, and demonstrates the potential power of a hadron collider to determine supersymmetric parameters. It also has implications for the top mass measurement and the interpretation of the LEP Rb excess. PAC codes: 12.60.Jv, 12.15.Mm, 14.65.Ha, 14.80.L †
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[email protected] 1 Introduction While there is still no compelling experimental evidence that nature is supersymmetric on the weak scale, there have been recent reports of data that encourage this view. The most explicit is an event in CDF [1] that does not have a probable SM interpretation, and can naturally be explained as selectron pair production[2, 3].