Trilepton signals from supersymmetric models at the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton collider

Squarks and gluinos are natural targets for collider searches due to the large production cross sections. However, for current collider energies, the production of these sparticles is kinematically suppressed. Collider experiments have placed lower limits on the mass of the chargino; LEP2 places a lower limit of 95 GeV on the chargino, mass for a wide variety of models. This implies that the gluino mass is heavier than ∼300GeV. Therefore, the dominant SUSY processes at the Tevatron are W˜1 W˜1 and W˜1 Z˜2 production. The most promising signal appears to be that of the trilepton signal arising from W˜ 1Z˜2 production. Since the trilepton signal from W˜1Z˜ 2 production is of such importance, it warrants further examination, especially in light of the improvements that have been made in computational ability. Besides updating the SUSY reach calculations for luminosity upgrades of the Tevatron, new elements are added. Decay matrix elements that are used in the computation of lepton momenta, where leptons are produced from the decay of the chargino and the neutralino, are added to the calculations. The trilepton background from W*Z* and W*gamma* production is also added here, and proves to be the dominant background. Also, in part due to these new backgrounds, modified sets of cuts axe introduced so as to reduce the background and increase the range of parameter values. This signal is examined for several models: the mSUGRA model, models with non-universal gaugino masses, and the Yukawa unified SO(10) SUSY GUT model.