Impact of hadronic decays of the lightest neutralino on the reach of the CERN LHC

If R parity is not conserved, the lightest supersymmetric particle could decay via lepton-number-violating or baryon-number-violating interactions. The latter case is particularly insidious since it leads to a reduction of the E/T as well as leptonic signals for supersymmetry. We evaluate cross sections for jets plus E/T, 1scr(l), 2scr(l) (same sign and opposite sign), and 3scr(l) event topologies that result from the simultaneous production of all sparticles at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), assuming that the lightest supersymmetric particle Z1 decays hadronically inside the detector via R-parity-violating interactions. We assume that these interactions do not affect the production rates or decays of other sparticles. We examine the SUSY reach of the LHC for this open-quotes pessimisticclose quotes scenario, and show that experiments at the LHC will still be able to search for gluinos and squarks as heavy as 1 TeV, given just 10 fb-1 of integrated luminosity, even with cuts designed to explore the canonical SUSY framework with a conserved R parity. copyright 1997 The American Physical Society