Aspects of chargino-neutralino production at the Fermilab Tevatron collider

We have used ISAJET 7.01/ISASUSY 1.0 to evaluate the rates and study distributions for trilepton events from the leptonic decays of charginos and neutralinos produced at the Fermilab Tevatron via the reaction pp̄→ ̃ \~W₁ ̃ \~Z₂+X for cuts inspired by the CDF and D0 experiments. We find that about 60% of these events do not contain any jets, and so should be easily identifiable over standard model backgrounds from tt̄ and WZ production, provided that the decay ̃ \~Z₂→ ̃ \~Z₁Z is kinematically inaccessible. We further show that, with suitable cuts, these backgrounds can be reduced to less than 1-2 fb even if nⱼₑₜ=1, effectively increasing the SUSY sample by 50%. We confirm that the signal is only rate limited, and that the Fermilab Tevatron after an accumulation of 100 pb^-1 of integrated luminosity will be able to explore parameters well beyond the range of CERN LEP and, if sleptons are substantially lighter than squarks, close to the reach of LEP 200.