Trilepton Signal for Supersymmetry at the Fermilab Tevatron Revisited

Abstract

Within a wide class of models, the LEP2 lower limit of 95 GeV on the chargino mass implies gluinos are heavier than $\sim$300 GeV. In this case electroweak $\tw_1\twb_1$ and $\tw_1\tz_2$ production are the dominant SUSY processes at the Tevatron, and the extensively examined isolated trilepton signal from $\tw_1\tz_2$ production assumes an even greater importance. We update our previous calculations of the SUSY reach of luminosity upgrades of the Fermilab Tevatron in this channel incorporating ({\it i}) decay matrix elements in the computation of the momenta of leptons from chargino and neutralino decays, ({\it ii}) the trilepton background from $W^*Z^*$ and $W^*γ^*$ production which, though neglected in previous analyses, turns out to be the dominant background, and finally, ({\it iii}) modified sets of cuts designed to reduce these new backgrounds and increase the range of model parameters for which the signal is observable. We show our improved projections for the reach for SUSY of both the Fermilab Main Injector and the proposed TeV33 upgrade. We also present opposite sign same flavor dilepton invariant mass distributions as well as the $p_T$ distributions of leptons in SUSY trilepton events, and comment upon how the inclusion of decay matrix elements impacts upon the Tevatron reach, as well as upon the extraction of neutralino masses.