The role of beam polarization for radiative neutralino production at the ILC

Abstract

We analyze the impact of electron and positron beam polarization on radiative neutralino production at the international linear collider (ILC). We focus on three different mSUGRA scenarios in turn at the Higgs strahlung threshold, the top pair production threshold, and at $\sqrt{s} =$500 GeV. In these scenarios at the corresponding $\sqrt{s}$, radiative neutralino production is the only supersymmetric production mechanism that is kinematically allowed. The heavier neutralinos and charginos as well as the sleptons, squarks and gluinos are too heavy to be pair produced. We calculate the signal cross section and also the standard model background from radiative neutrino production. For our scenarios, we obtain significances larger than 10 and signal to background ratios between 2% and 5%, if we have electron beam polarization $P_{e^-} = 0.0$–0.8 and positron beam polarization $P_{e^+} = 0.0$–0.3. If we have electron beam polarization of $P_{e^-} = 0.9$, then the signal is observable with $P_{e^+} = 0.0$ but both the significance and the signal to background ratio are significantly improved for $P_{e^+} = 0.3$.