Testing the Majorana Nature of Gluinos and Neutralinos

Gluinos and neutralinos, supersymmetric partners of gluons and neutral electroweak gauge and Higgs bosons, are Majorana particles in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model [MSSM]. Decays of such self-conjugate particles generate charge symmetric ensembles of final states. Moreover, production channels of supersymmetric particles at colliders are characteristically affected by the Majorana nature of particles exchanged in the production processes. The sensitivity to the Majorana character of the particles can be quantified by comparing the predictions with Dirac exchange mechanisms. A consistent framework for introducing gluino and neutralino Dirac fields can be designed by extending the N=1 supersymmetry of the MSSM to N=2 in the gauge sector. We examine to which extent like-sign dilepton production in the processes q q -> ~q ~q and e- e- -> ~e- ~e- is affected by the exchange of either Majorana or Dirac gluinos and neutralinos, respectively, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and in the prospective e- e- mode of a lepton linear collider.