Gluino

In supersymmetry, a gluino (symbol
g͂
) is the hypothetical supersymmetric partner of a gluon. Should they exist, gluinos are expected by supersymmetry theorists to be pair produced in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.^[1]

In supersymmetric theories, gluinos are Majorana fermions and interact via the strong force as a color octet.^[2] Gluinos have a lepton number 0, baryon number 0, and spin 1/2.

In models of supersymmetry that conserve R-parity, gluinos decay via the strong interaction to a squark and a quark, provided that an appropriate mass relation is satisfied. The squark subsequently decays to another quark and the lightest supersymmetric particle, LSP (which leaves the detector unseen). This means that a typical signal for a gluino at a hadron collider would be four jets plus missing energy.

However if gluinos are lighter than squarks, 3-body decay of a gluino to a neutralino and a quark antiquark pair is kinematically accessible through an off-shell squark.

Footnotes

1. Lincoln, Don (2013-07-03). "Supersymmetric glue: the search for gluinos". CERN. cms.web.cern.ch. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
2. As there are 8 gluons of different color combinations, there are 8 gluinos of different color combinations, too.