Propagation of supersymmetric charged sleptons at high energies

The potential for neutrino telescopes to discover charged stau production in neutrino–nucleon interactions in Earth depends in part on the stau lifetime and range. In some supersymmetric scenarios, the next lightest supersymmetric particle is a stau with a decay length on the scale of 10 km. We evaluate the electromagnetic energy loss as a function of energy and stau mass. The energy loss parameter β scales as the inverse stau mass for the dominating electromagnetic processes, photonuclear and e+e− pair production. The range can be parameterized as a function of stau mass, initial energy and minimum final energy. In comparison to earlier estimates of the stau range, our results are as much as a factor of two larger, improving the potential for stau discovery in neutrino telescopes.