Closing the light gluino gap with electron-proton colliders

The future electron-proton collider proposals, LHeC and FCC-he, can deliver O(TeV) center-of-mass energy collisions, higher than most of the proposed lepton accelerators, with O(ab−1) luminosity, while maintaining a much cleaner experimental environment as compared to the hadron machines. This unique capability of e−p colliders can be harnessed in probing beyond the Standard Model scenarios giving final states that look like hadronic noise at pp machines. In the present study, we explore the prospects of detecting such a prompt signal having multiple soft jets at the LHeC. Such a signal can come from the decay of gluino in R-parity-violating or stealth supersymmetry, where there exists a gap in the current experimental search with m
˜
g≈50–70  GeV. We perform a simple analysis to demonstrate that, with simple signal selection cuts, we can close this gap at the LHeC at the 95% confidence level, even in the presence of a reasonable systematic error. More sophisticated signal selection strategies and detailed knowledge of the detector can be used to improve the prospects of signal detection.