Measurement of the Gluino Mass via Cascade Decays for SPS 1a

If R-parity conserving supersymmetry is realised with masses below the TeV scale, sparticles will be produced and decay in cascades at the LHC. In the case of a neutral LSP, which will not be detected, decay chains cannot be fully reconstructed, complicating the mass determination of the new particles. In this paper we extend the method of obtaining masses from kinematical endpoints to include a gluino at the head of a five-sparticle decay chain. This represents a non-trivial extension of the corresponding method for the squark decay chain. We calculate the endpoints of the new distributions and assess their applicability by examining the theoretical distributions for a variety of mass scenarios. The precision with which the gluino mass can be determined by this method is investigated for the mSUGRA point SPS 1a. Finally we estimate the improvement obtained from adding a Linear Collider measurement of the LSP mass.