Rapidity Gap Events for Squark Pair Production at the LHC

The exchange of electroweak gauginos in the $t-$ or $u-$channel allows squark pair production at hadron colliders without color exchange between the squarks. This can give rise to events where little or no energy is deposited in the detector between the squark decay products. We discuss the potential for detection of such rapidity gap events at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We present an analysis with full event simulation using PYTHIA as well as Herwig++, but without detector simulation. We analyze the transverse energy deposited between the jets from squark decay, as well as the probability of finding a third jet in between the two hardest jets. For the mSUGRA benchmark point SPS1a we find statistically significant evidence for a color singlet exchange contribution.
Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To be published in the proceedings of SUSY09, Northeastern University, Boston, MA