Hunting long-lived gluinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory

Eventual signals of split supersymmetry in cosmic ray physics are analyzed in detail. The study focuses particularly on quasistable colorless R-hadrons originating from confinement of long-lived gluinos (with quarks, antiquarks, and gluons) produced in $pp$ collisions at astrophysical sources. Because of parton density requirements, the gluino has a momentum which is considerably smaller than the energy of the primary proton, and so production of heavy (mass ~500 GeV) R-hadrons requires powerful cosmic ray engines able to accelerate particles up to extreme energies, somewhat above 1013.6 GeV. Using a realistic Monte Carlo simulation with the AIRES engine, we study the main characteristics of the air showers triggered when one of these exotic hadrons impinges on a stationary nucleon of the Earth's atmosphere. We show that R-hadron air showers present clear differences with respect to those initiated by standard particles. We use these shower characteristics to construct observables which may be used to distinguish long-lived gluinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory.