Study of Metastable Staus at Linear Colliders

Abstract

We consider scenarios in which the lightest sparticle (LSP) is the gravitino and the next-to-lightest sparticle (NLSP) is a metastable stau. We examine the production of stau pairs in e^{+}e^{-} annihilation at ILC and CLIC energies. In addition to three minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) benchmark scenarios proposed previously, we consider a new high-mass scenario in which effects catalyzed by stau bound states yield abundances of {6,7}Li that fit the astrophysical data better than standard Big-Bang nucleosynthesis. This scenario could be probed only at CLIC energies. In each scenario, we show how the stau mixing angle may be determined from measurements of the total stau pair-production cross sections with polarized beams, and of the tau polarization in stau decays. Using realistic ILC and CLIC luminosity spectra, we find for each scenario the centre-of-mass energy that maximizes the number of staus with βγ< 0.4, that may be trapped in a generic detector. The dominant sources of such slow-moving staus are generically the pair production and cascade decays of heavier sparticles with higher thresholds, and the optimal centre-of-mass energy is typically considerably beyond 2 m_{\tildeτ_1}.