Impact of hadronic decays of the lightest neutralino on the reach of the CERN LHC

If $R$ parity is not conserved, the lightest supersymmetric particle could decay via lepton-number-violating or baryon-number-violating interactions. The latter case is particularly insidious since it leads to a reduction of the ${\stackrel{/}{E}}_{T}$ as well as leptonic signals for supersymmetry. We evaluate cross sections for jets plus ${\stackrel{/}{E}}_{T},$ 1$\mathcal{l}$, $2\mathcal{l}$ (same sign and opposite sign), and $3\mathcal{l}$ event topologies that result from the simultaneous production of all sparticles at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), assuming that the lightest supersymmetric particle ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{Z}}_{1}$ decays hadronically inside the detector via $R$-parity-violating interactions. We assume that these interactions do not affect the production rates or decays of other sparticles. We examine the SUSY reach of the LHC for this ``pessimistic'' scenario, and show that experiments at the LHC will still be able to search for gluinos and squarks as heavy as 1 TeV, given just 10 fb${}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ of integrated luminosity, even with cuts designed to explore the canonical SUSY framework with a conserved $R$ parity.