PHOTON SIGNATURES FOR LOW-ENERGY SUPERSYMMETRY BREAKING AND BROKEN R-PARITY

The possible phenomenological consequences of R-parity violating inter actions in the framework of low energy supersymmetry breaking are stud ied. It is pointed out that even very weak R-parity violation would co mpletely overshadow one of the basic signatures of low energy supersym metry breaking models, that is the decay of the next to lightest super symmetric particle into a photon (lepton) and missing energy. Thus, th e observation of these decays would put very strong limits on R-parity violating couplings. Vice-versa, if R-parity violation is established experimentally, before a detailed knowledge of the spectrum is obtain ed, it will be very difficult to distinguish gravity mediated from low energy gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking scenarios. Those conclus ions are very model independent. We also comment on the possibility of mixing between charged and neutral leptons with charginos and neutral inos, respectively, and its phenomenological consequences for the phot on (lepton) signatures, in scenarios where this mixing is generated by the presence of bilinear or trilinear R-parity violating terms in the superpotential. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All right s reserved.