Dark matter as a guide toward a light gluino at the LHC

Motivated by specific connections to dark matter signatures, we study the prospects of observing the presence of a relatively light gluino whose mass is in the range similar to (500-900) GeV with a wino-like lightest supersymmetric particle with mass in the range of similar to (170-210) GeV. The light gaugino spectra studied here is generally different from other models, and in particular those with a wino dominated LSP, in that here the gluinos can be significantly lighter. The positron excess reported by the PAMELA satellite data is accounted for by annihilations of the wino LSP and their relic abundance can generally be brought near the WMAP constraints due to the late decay of a modulus Field re-populating the density of relic dark matter. We also mention the recent FERMI photon constraints on annihilating dark matter in this class of models and implications for direct detection experiments including COMS and XENON. We study these signatures in models of supersymmetry with non-minimal soft breaking terms derived from both string compactifications and related supergravity models which generally lead to non-universal gaugino masses. At the LHC, large event rates from the three-body decays of the gluino in certain parts of the parameter space are found to give rise to early discovery prospects for the gaugino sector. Excess events at the 5 sigma level cats arise with luminosity as low as O(100) pb(-1) at a center of mass energy of 10 TeV and less than or similar to O(1) fb(-1) at root s = 7 TeV. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.