R-hadrons

When a coloured SUSY particle is longer-lived than typical hadronization scales, i.e. around c*tau > 1 fm, or equivalently width Gamma < 0.2 GeV, it will have time to hadronize into a colour singlet hadronic state, a R-hadron. Currently a set of such R-hadrons have been implemented for the case of a long-lived gluino, stop or sbottom. Needless to say, the normal case would be that only one of them will be long-lived enough to form R-hadrons.

For simplicity all gluino-mesons are assumed to have light-flavour spin 1, since those are the lightest and favoured by spin-state counting. Further, all gluino-baryons are bookkept as having light-flavour spin 3/2, and flavours are listed in descending order. This is more for convenience of notation, however, since the normal baryon octet e.g. has no uuu = "p++" state. When a diquark is extracted, a mixture of spin 0 and spin 1 is allowed. Names and codes are essentially in agreement with the PDG conventions, e.g.
1000993 R0(~g g) (or gluinoball)
1009213 R+(~g u dbar) (or gluino-rho+)
1092214 R+(~g uud) (or gluino-Delta+)
For internal bookkeeping of momenta, the code 1009002, Rtemp(~g q), is used to denote the intermediate state formed when only one of the two string pieces attached to the gluino has broken.

For the stop- and sbottom-hadrons the spin counting is simpler, since it is entirely given by the constituent quark or diquark spin. Again names and codes follow PDG conventions, e.g.
1000612 R+(~t dbar)
1006211 R+(~t ud0)

The spin and electromagnetic charge of the new particle plays only a minor role in the hadronization process, that can be neglected to first approximation. Therefore it is possible to use the same R-hadrons framework instead for other BSM scenarios with long-lived coloured particles, e.g. with massive extra-dimensions copies of gluons and quarks, or with leptoquarks. This can be regulated by the switches below. Note that the codes and names of the R-hadrons is not changed when the heavy particle involved is switched, for reasons of administrative simplicity. R-hadron mass spectra and other relevant particle data is automatically updated to reflect the change, however.

flag  RHadrons:allow   (default = off)
Allows the gluino, stop and sbottom to hadronize if their respective widths are below the limit RHadrons:maxWidth.

parm  RHadrons:maxWidth   (default = 0.2; minimum = 0.0; maximum = 1.0)
The maximum width of the gluino for which it is possible to form R-hadrons, provided that RHadrons:allow is on.

mode  RHadrons:idGluino   (default = 1000021)
The gluino identity code. For other scenarios than SUSY this code could be changed to represent another long-lived uncharged colour octet particle, that then would be treated in the same spirit. Could be set to 0 to forbid any gluino R-hadron formation even when the above two criteria, RHadrons:allow and RHadrons:maxWidth, are met.

mode  RHadrons:idStop   (default = 1000006)
The lightest stop identity code. For other scenarios than SUSY this code could be changed to represent another long-lived charge 2/3 colour triplet particle, that then would be treated in the same spirit. As above it could be set to 0 to forbid any stop R-hadron formation.

mode  RHadrons:idSbottom   (default = 1000005)
The lightest sbottom identity code. For other scenarios than SUSY this code could be changed to represent another long-lived charge -1/3 colour triplet particle, that then would be treated in the same spirit. As above it could be set to 0 to forbid any sbottom R-hadron formation.

flag  RHadrons:allowDecay   (default = on)
Allows the R-hadrons to decay or not. If the gluino/stop/sbottom is stable or too long-lived to decay inside the detector this switch has no real function, since then no decays will be performed anyway. If the sparticle is so short-lived that it decays before reaching the beam pipe then having the decay on is the logical choice. So the interesting region is when the decays happens after the R-hadron has passed through part of the detector, and changed its momentum and quite possibly its flavour content before it is to decay. Then normal decays should be switched off, and the R-hadron tracked through matter by a program like GEANT [Kra04,Mac07]. After that, the new R-hadron info can be overwritten into the event record and the Pythia::forceRHadronDecay() method can be called to force this modified R-hadron to decay.

flag  RHadrons:setMasses   (default = on)
Use simple mass formulae to construct all available R-hadron masses based on the currently initialized gluino/squark masses and the constituent masses of the other partons in the hadron. If you switch this off, it is your responsibility to set each of the R-hadron masses on your own, and set them in an internally consistent way. If you mess up on this you may generate accordingly crazy results. Specifically, it is to be assumed that none of the R-hadrons has a mass below its constituent sparticle, i.e. that the light degrees of freedom and the additional confinement gluon field gives a net positive contribution to the R-hadron mass.

parm  RHadrons:probGluinoball   (default = 0.1; minimum = 0.0; maximum = 1.0)
The fraction of produced gluino R-hadrons that are contain a "valence" gluon, with the rest containing a meson or baryon quark flavour content.

parm  RHadrons:mOffsetCloud   (default = 0.2; minimum = 0.0)
Extra mass (in GeV) added to each of the one or two extra constituent masses in an R-hadron, to calculate the mass of a R-hadron. The same offset is also used when the R-hadron momentum and mass is split between the squark or gluino and the one or two light (di)quarks, one for a squark and two for a gluino. Thus once or twice this amount represents a part of the nominal squark or gluino mass that will not decay weakly, since it is taken to correspond to the cloud of gluons that surround the squark or gluino.

parm  RHadrons:mCollapse   (default = 1.0; minimum = 0.0)
A colour singlet system with an invariant mass less than this amount, above the R-hadron mass with the given flavour content, is assumed to collapse to this single R-hadron, whereas a full fragmentation handling is applied above this mass.

parm  RHadrons:diquarkSpin1   (default = 0.5; minimum = 0.0; maximum = 1.0)
Probability that a diquark extracted from the flavour code of a gluino R-hadron should be assigned spin 1, with the rest being spin 0. Does not apply for two identical quarks, where spin 1 is only possibility. Note that gluino R-hadron codes for simplicity are assigned as if spin is 1 always, and so give no guidance. For stop and sbottom the diquark spin is preserved in the particle code, so there is no corresponding issue.