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# Isoscaling Studies of Fission - a Sensitive Probe into the Dynamics of Scission

## I Introduction

Nuclear fission, first observed in 1938 Hahn and Strassman (1939); Meitner and Frisch (1939), has been investigated extensively for many decades Specht (1974); Brosa et al. (1990); Hamilton (1996). The model description of scission ranged from the early statistical model of Fong Fong (1956) to the advanced statistical model of Wilkins Wilkins et al. (1976) and, more recently, to the dynamical description of the random-neck rupture model of Brosa Brosa et al. (1990). Despite the obtained level of understanding, there are still many open questions and challenges remaining ( for an overview see e.g. Hamilton et al. (2000)). Fission-like phenomena have been observed recently also in metallic clusters Naher (1997). Typically, nuclear fission produces a wide range of fragments with different atomic and mass numbers. Similar wide mass and charge distributions of reaction products can be observed in nuclear reactions leading to the production of hot nuclei which de-excite by emission of charged fragments. It has recently been observed Tsang et al. (2001) that for two similar reactions occurring at the same temperature, that differ only in the isospin asymmetry, the ratio R21(N,Z) of the yields of a given fragment (N,Z) exhibits an exponential dependence on N and Z of the form $`R_{21}(N,Z)\mathrm{exp}(\alpha N+\beta Z)`$ , this scaling behavior being termed isoscaling Tsang et al. (2001). Initially, the investigations of isoscaling focused on the yields of light fragments up to oxygen, originating from the massive hot systems produced at intermediate energies Tsang et al. (2001), or high energies Botvina et al. (2002). The isoscaling behavior was attributed to the difference of statistical de-excitation of two massive hot systems with different isospin asymmetry. In recent articles Souliotis et al. (2003a); Souliotis et al. (2003b), the investigation of isoscaling is reported using the heavy residue data from the reactions of 25 MeV/nucleon 86Kr projectiles with 124Sn,112Sn and 64Ni, 58Ni targets. The global isoscaling behavior is observed for heavy residues originating from the most damped collisions, while the dependence of the isoscaling parameters $`\alpha `$ and $`\beta `$ on deposited excitation energy can be used to extract information on the level of N/Z-equilibration between the projectile and target, ranging from no equilibration at the most peripheral collisions to full equilibration at the most damped collisions. The investigation of isoscaling on reconstructed hot quasi-projectiles with mass A=20-30 from the reactions of 30 and 50 MeV/nucleon 28Si with 124,112Sn targets was reported in Veselsky et al. (2004). The observed dependence of the isoscaling parameter on excitation energy of the quasi-projectile was independent of the projectile energy and the resulting difference of inclusive isoscaling parameters at different projectile energies reflects different excitation energy distributions. Furthermore, due to the known level of N/Z-equilibration Veselsky et al. (2004), the temperature dependence of the isoscaling parameter was used to extract information on the onset of chemical separation. In general, the isoscaling studies appear to be a rather global method to investigate nuclear processes, manifesting the response of the system to the variation of the isospin asymmetry. The exponential scaling is typically a signal that some degree of equilibrium was reached.

It is of interest to further explore the isoscaling across the wide range of nuclear processes, even the most traditional ones explored in most detail. In this study, we present the results of an isoscaling analysis of the fragment yield data from fission induced by fast neutrons. The evaluated independent fragment yields from the fission of 233,238U targets induced by 14 MeV neutrons England and Rider (1994) were used.

## II Isoscaling Analysis of Fission Fragment Yields

In Fig. 1, we present the ratios of the fragment yields from the fission of 238,233U targets induced by 14 MeV neutrons, obtained using the recommended independent fission fragment yields from the evaluated nuclear data file ENDF-349 England and Rider (1994). The recommended yields are obtained as a result of the evaluation procedure and comprise both the fission yield measurements reported in the literature and the calculated Gaussian extrapolations of charge distributions for given masses. Despite limitations, such data possess a predictive power worth to explore, partially also due to the immensity and diversity of the existing experimental data. The study was restricted to recommended independent yields larger than 10-5 %.

In Fig. 1, one can observe, in the majority of the cases, a remarkable isoscaling behavior of isotopic chains with more than ten members. As mentioned above, some of the last data points are the results of extrapolation using the calculated Gaussian charge distributions. Nevertheless, since the evaluations have been done on a case-by-case basis, independently for each mass ( and not for each element ), the continuation of the trend they represent is possibly related to the physical behavior of the system without being excessively biased by the evaluation procedure. The available neutron multiplicity data from photofission of 238U at comparable excitation energy De Frenne et al. (1982) show that the fragments typically emit only two neutrons on average and thus the effect of emission is rather limited. Thus the observed behavior in Fig. 1 may imply that the isoscaling behavior is mainly determined by the dynamical evolution of the system prior to scission.

Of special interest for investigation are the mass regions corresponding to the most asymmetric mass splits. Practically all fragments below Zn exhibit weak dependence of R21 on the neutron number, strongly contrasting the enhanced sensitivity of R21 for their partners, the heaviest observed fission fragments. Such a weak dependence may imply a higher temperature of the scissioning light pre-fragment, since the isoscaling parameter is typically, within the grand-canonical approximation, considered inversely proportional to the temperature ( $`\alpha `$=$`\mathrm{\Delta }\mu _n`$/T, $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mu _n`$ being the difference of neutron chemical potentials of the two fragmenting systems ). It is, however not a priori obvious why such grand-canonical formula could be applied to fission. On the other hand, one can arrive at a formula of similar structure using the nucleon transport theory appropriate for fission. Typically the process of fission can be divided into two phases. The fissioning system must first overcome the saddle point ( the peak of the fission barrier ), thus entering the irreversible path towards scission. In the second stage, the properties of the scission configuration are determined during the long descent from the saddle to the scission configuration. The process of fission ( as well as the closely related process of deep-inelastic nucleus-nucleus collision ) can be described in terms of collective motion using the transport theory Randrup (1979); Feldmeier (1987); Hofmann (1997); Frobrich and Gonchar (1998). The dynamics of the collective degrees of freedom is typically described using the Langevin or Fokker-Planck equation. From a practical point of view, the isoscaling occurs when the two mass distributions for a given Z from two processes with different isospin are Gaussian distributions of the same width with different mean masses. Isotopic yield distributions can be, according to transport theory, considered as the solutions of the Fokker-Planck equation ( Gaussian mass distributions ). A necessary condition for isoscaling, the assumption of equal width ( typically a sign of equal temperatures ) leads in the context of the Fokker-Planck equation to equal values of the diffusion coefficients. Then the isotopic dependence of the yield ratio $`R_{21}`$ will assume the form

$$R_{21}(N)\mathrm{exp}(\frac{V_{N2}V_{N1}}{2D_{NN}}N)$$
(1)
where $`V_{N1,2}`$ are the drift coefficients characterizing the two processes with different isospin and $`D_{NN}`$ is the common diffusion coefficient. The transport theory typically complies with the fluctuation-dissipation theorem $`V_NT=D_{NN}F_N`$ which after expressing the driving force as $`F_N=\mathrm{\Delta }\mu _{nab}`$ Feldmeier (1987) leads to the following expression for the isoscaling coefficient

$$\alpha =\mathrm{\Delta }(\mathrm{\Delta }\mu _{nab})/2T$$
(2)
where $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mu _{nab}`$ is the difference of neutron chemical potentials of interacting nuclei $`a,b`$ determining the drift velocity. Thus apparently the isoscaling behavior is consistent with statistical transport theory. Within the statistical transport theory, the two interacting nuclei ( fission fragments ) can both be treated statistically using a grand-canonical approach Feldmeier (1987), with two different temperatures, with the stochastic force depending in the general case on both temperatures. The temperature $`T`$ thus possibly can be related to the Fermi gas temperature of the fragments in the given isotopic chain. In the photofission of 238U, the observed neutron multiplicities for the lightest and heaviest fragments observed ( about two neutrons on average De Frenne et al. (1982) for A$``$90 and A$``$150 ) correspond to different fragment temperatures, higher temperature for the lightest fragments and lower for the heaviest fragments. In Fig. 1 the light fragments typically exhibit weak logarithmic slopes while their heavy partners exhibit much larger logarithmic slopes. The equation (2), based on the transport theory, suggests that the logarithmic slopes ( isoscaling parameters ) can indeed be related to temperature and excitation energy, thus possibly establishing an analogy with De Frenne et al. (1982). A quantitative test of the equation (2) would be helpful in order to establish such analogy.

The high sensitivity of neutron-rich heavy fragments to the neutron content of the fissioning system, combined with observation from De Frenne et al. (1982) that the multiplicity of neutrons emitted from heavier fragment is less dependent on photon energy, is of considerable interest for the production of neutron-rich nuclei, since it suggests that neutron-rich heavy fragments can be created in the fission of neutron-rich uranium isotopes, thus leading to the production of neutron-rich nuclei which are of crucial importance for future rare isotope beam facilities, e.g. Nolen (2002); Morrissey (2002); Guerreau (2002). From a nuclear reaction standpoint, a promising candidate for the production of very neutron-rich fissile nuclei would be the peripheral collision of heavy fissile nuclei at energies between the Coulomb barrier and the Fermi energy Souliotis et al. (2003c) leading to the moderately excited heavy uranium-like nuclei which would further fission into neutron-rich fragments. Some encouraging results have been obtained already using a 238U beam at 20 MeV/nucleon Souliotis et al. (1997, 2000). Of special interest for future experiments is the reaction of 238U beam with targets exhibiting the effect of neutron skin, such as 64Ni and 124Sn Souliotis et al. (2002, 2003d) or 208Pb and 238U.

Apart from the typically regular isoscaling behavior across the periodic table, the isoscaling behavior is violated in some regions, most prominently around N=62, around N=80 and possibly around N=86-88. The violation of the isoscaling in the regions N=80 can be possibly related to the neutron shell closure around N=82. The isoscaling behavior around another strong neutron shell closure around N=50 does not seem to exhibit irregularities exceeding the statistical ones. The breakdown of isoscaling around N=62 can not be directly related to the effect of any spherical shell closure in the final fission fragments. On the contrary, in this region the nuclei are supposed to be typically deformed. However, according to the fission model of Wilkins et al. Wilkins et al. (1976), it may be related to the effect of the deformed neutron shell at N=64 with quadrupole deformation $`\beta _{quad}`$=0.6 ( point C in Fig. 1 of Wilkins et al. (1976) ) which plays a crucial role in the dynamics of scission. In a similar manner the violation of isoscaling in the region N=80 and possibly N=86-88 can be related to points G ( N=82 and $`\beta _{quad}`$=0 ) and H ( N=88 and $`\beta _{quad}`$=0.65 ). The smooth dependence for Z=50 can be explained by the influence of spherical proton shell Z=50, again in accord with the conclusions of Wilkins et al. (1976). Thus the observed isoscaling behavior appears to be generally consistent with the model calculations of Wilkins et al. concerning the scission configuration which allows to assume that it may reflect the real properties of the scission configuration. On the other hand, the probability of a given fission channel can be considered as a function of the scission configuration as a whole. Within the grand-canonical picture of isoscaling which describes de-excitation phenomena Tsang et al. (2001), the effect of binding energy ( and thus of the ground state shell correction ) of the final product is canceled out and only the properties of the whole excited system are reflected. In analogy, since the scission configuration is essentially binary, one can assume that the irregularities exhibited for final fragments around some neutron number may be caused by the shell structure of the other fragment. Then the observed structure around N=62 can be possibly related to the effect of N=82 shell closure in the other fragment. However, in the same sense the observed structure around N=80 should not be attributed to the shell closure around N=82 but to the presence of shell closure around approximately N=64 of the other fragment. Thus, again the observed behavior points to the presence of the dominant shell closures in the scission configuration, one around N=82 and another one around N=62-64. The former one can be either the ground state spherical shell closure or the deformed shell closure as calculated by Wilkins et al. Wilkins et al. (1976). The latter shell closure can be only deformed ( as calculated by Wilkins et al. Wilkins et al. (1976) ). In any case the mass of the fissioning systems 234,239U causes that the two observed effects are exhibited by complementary fission fragments.

In order to separate the two effects, a logical step is to continue the analysis by investigating a fissioning system of different mass, for practical reasons heavier. The systematic fission data for nuclei heavier than uranium are rather scarce, one nevertheless can find a good candidate in evaluated fragment yield data from spontaneous fission of heavier nuclei such as 248,244Cm England and Rider (1994). The spontaneous fission is a much colder process where additional phenomena such as barrier penetration probability and potential energy surface can play a crucial role, it is nevertheless interesting to explore it in the context of isoscaling. The isoscaling plot from the spontaneous fission of 248,244Cm is shown in Fig. 2. In the spontaneous fission of 248,244Cm, the overall isoscaling behavior can be observed from the most populated region of mass distributions towards asymmetric mass splits. The breakdowns featuring rather the slope change than the structures observed in the previous case are observed around N=50 and N=62. A significant effect is observed around N=68-70 ( with complementary fragment around N=82 ), which nevertheless can be a sign of transition into symmetric region around N=74-76 where the behavior is rather irregular. Further the isoscaling behavior is quite regular up to the heaviest fragments ( with the exception around N=94 where a hint of isoscaling breakdown can be observed ). It is remarkable that the breakdown of isoscaling ( slope change ) is again observed around N=62 ( along with N=50 ) which possibly points to the role of shell structure, which may influence the potential energy surface and thus the probability of a given fission channel. While around N=50 the shell structure can be identified with spherical fragment, for the region around N=62 the influence of the deformed shell is the most plausible. The observed isoscaling behavior in the spontaneous fission of 248,244Cm, despite the more complex dynamics of the cold process, again appears to point to the role of the deformed shell closures ( in particluar around N=64 ) in the fission of actinides.

The above isoscaling analysis was carried out using the recommended fission fragment yields obtained as a compilation of the existing fission fragment yield data complemented with model based extrapolations. The uncertainty of the extrapolated data depends on the detailed extrapolation procedure and its magnitude is not expressed quantititively. It is of interest to establish whether the observed behavior could be influenced by the uncertainty of the extrapolation. Since both the overall isoscaling behavior and the irregularities in particular regions around the neutron numbers N=62 and N=80 are observed across many isotopic chains with values of yields ranging across several orders of magnitude, one can conclude that the observed behavior corresponds to the details of the fission process rather than to the uncertainty of the data.

For the fission of 238,233U targets induced by 14 MeV neutrons, we present in Fig. 3a the systematics of the isoscaling parameters $`\alpha `$, obtained by exponential fits of the isotope chains, as a function of the atomic number Z. One line was fitted for each Z ( see Fig. 1 ). As already discussed, the isoscaling parameter $`\alpha `$ decreases below Z=32, while one can observe an increase above Z=58, thus possibly signaling a relatively hot light fragment and a colder heavy fragment in the asymmetric fission channels. In the central part of the fragment mass distribution, one can observe an increase up to the maximum around Z=38, then an abrupt discontinuity around Z=40 and a linear increase above. According to formula (2), the decrease of the isoscaling parameter $`\alpha `$ around Z=42 signals rather hot ( and possibly initially deformed ) fragments which is a reasonable result when considering that the second fragment for such a mass split is in the vicinity of Z=50 proton shell and it can be expected to be spherical and possibly colder, as one can conclude from the increase of values of $`\alpha `$ around Z=50. This is again consistent with the model calculations of Wilkins et al. Wilkins et al. (1976) which obtained a decrease of distance of centers for corresponding mass splits ( see Fig. 27 of Wilkins et al. (1976) ). Also the recent results from ternary fission suggest that typically the low energy light charged particle in the spontaneous fission of 252Cf is correlated with a 132Sn fragment and a strongly deformed light complementary fragment at scission Jandel et al. (2002a, b), that may de-excite by secondary emission of the low energy ternary particle. One can also attempt to relate the discontinuous Z-dependence of the isoscaling parameter $`\alpha `$ to the sawtooth dependence of the neutron multiplicity on fragment mass De Frenne et al. (1982); Terrell (1962); Bowman et al. (1963), which motivated the model of random neck-rupture Brosa et al. (1990). However, in the partially complete data from the photofission of 238U De Frenne et al. (1982), the minimum in the neutron multiplicity, signaling the position of the discontinuity, appears at the mass approximately A=130 rather than at masses A=100-108, corresponding approximately to Z=42. The way for detailed comparison of the isoscaling parameters $`\alpha `$ with the neutron multiplicity, determined in De Frenne et al. (1982), is not trivial, since there the measured neutron multiplicity for a given fragment pair was divided between the fragments according to the model calculation. In any case, the observed discrepancy deserves further investigations.

As a further step in the isoscaling analysis, we test the potential of the Eqn. (2), derived from transport theory, to provide quantitative information on the properties of the scission configuration. In Fig. 3b,c we present an estimate of the apparent fragment temperatures obtained using Eqn. (2) and of the corresponding excitation energies. The quantity $`\mathrm{\Delta }(\mathrm{\Delta }\mu _{nab})`$ was approximated using the difference of neutron separation energies of two composite systems. Such approximation can be based on the assumptions that $`\mathrm{\Delta }(\mathrm{\Delta }\mu _{nab})`$, reflecting the difference of neutron transfer driving forces for two fissioning systems, will track with the difference of neutron chemical potential of the two composite systems. Thus we assume that the average driving force for a given fissile system is a property of the whole system and that its relative change between two fissiong systems is equal to the difference of chemical potentials, which can be roughly approximated by their neutron separation energies. However rough such approximation is, it provides an interesting quantitative test of Eqn. (2) and thus also of the underlying theory. As one can see in Fig. 3b,c, the extracted values of the apparent temperature and excitation energy indeed lead in some mass regions to reasonable agreement with the experimental neutron multiplicities of photofission of $`{}_{}{}^{238}U`$ De Frenne et al. (1982) at comparable excitation energies. Specifically for the most asymmetric splits ( A$``$90 vs 150, corresponding roughly to Z$``$36 vs 56 in the present work ) observed in De Frenne et al. (1982) approximately two neutrons are emitted from each fragment, thus suggesting the fragment excitation energies of about 15-20 MeV. For more central mass splits some similarity of trends can be observed, especially the excitation energy increase with increasing mass of the light fragment. The observed rapid increase of estimated temperatures and excitation energies for the lightest fragments in Fig. 3b,c may be caused by statistical uncertainties. While the above estimate is indeed rough, it nevertheless suggests a possibility to study details of the fission dynamics, e.g. to map the transfer driving force using the fragment temperatures measured independently. The specific observation that the estimated fragment temperatures are different for complementary light and heavy fragments can be understood naturally within the transport theory, where the number of transfers in both directions is typically comparable, thus leading to comparable excitation energies, which in the case of very asymmetric mass splits lead to a hotter light fragment and colder heavy fragment. Such a situation is routinely observed in peripheral mass-asymmetric nucleus-nucleus collisions ( see for example Veselsky et al. (2000) ), where the light quasiprojectile can get very hot while the quasitarget remains relatively cold.

In general, the isoscaling analysis of the fission data appears to be a sensitive tool to investigate the fission dynamics. While it can not substitute the traditional experimental investigations of fission, its simplicity can prove useful in situations where such studies are not possible. For instance, as suggested in Veselsky (2003), the knowledge of the fission dynamics of superheavy nuclei is essential for understanding of the possibility to synthesize still heavier nuclei. In this aspect, the isoscaling analysis of reactions with two targets, possibly isotopes of the same element, can allow investigations of the fission dynamics of very heavy nuclei, using either a designated experimental setup or radiochemical methods. From a theoretical point of view, the capability to reproduce the isoscaling behavior can be a simple but, nevertheless, crucial test of any fission model. Also, as shown in the above analysis, the isoscaling properties can provide essential information on the possibility to produce heavy neutron-rich nuclei which are essential to understand the nuclear properties in general and, in addition, the astrophysical processes leading to the nucleosynthesis of the heaviest elements.

## III Summary and Conclusions

In summary, the fragment yield ratios were investigated in the fission of 238,233U targets induced by 14 MeV neutrons. The isoscaling behavior was typically observed for isotopic chains ranging from the most proton-rich to most neutron-rich ones. The high sensitivity of the neutron-rich heavy fragments to the target neutron content suggests the viability of fission ( possibly following a peripheral collision with another n-rich nucleus ) as a source of very neutron-rich heavy nuclei for future rare ion beam facilities, thus allowing studies of the nuclear properties of such nuclei and exploration of the conditions for the nucleosynthesis of heavy nuclei. The observed breakdowns of the isoscaling behavior around N=62 and N=80 indicate the effect of two major shell closures on the dynamics of scission, one of them being the deformed shell closure around N=64. The isoscaling analysis of the spontaneous fission of 248,244Cm further supports such conclusion. The values of the isoscaling parameter appear to exhibit a structure which can be possibly related to details of scission dynamics e.g. for the charge split Z=42 vs Z=50. The isoscaling studies present a suitable tool for investigation of the fission dynamics of the heaviest nuclei, which can provide essential information about possible pathways to the synthesis of still heavier nuclei.

## Ackowledgements

This work was supported through grant of Slovak Scientific Grant Agency VEGA-2/1132/21. The research at the Cyclotron Institute of Texas A&M University is supported in part by the Robert A. Welch Foundation through grant No. A-1266, and the Department of Energy through grant No. DE-FG03-93ER40773.


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# Terabyte IDE RAID-5 Disk Arrays

## I Introduction

We report tests, using the Linux operating system, of redundant arrays of integrated drive electronics (IDE) disk drives for use in particle physics Monte Carlo simulations and data analysis farm . Parts costs of total systems using commodity IDE disks are now at the $2000 per terabyte level. A revolution is in the making. Disk storage prices have now decreased to the point where they are lower than the cost per terabyte of 300 terabyte Storage Technology tape silos. The disks also offer far better granularity; even small institutions can afford to deploy systems. The faster random access of disk versus tape is another major advantage. Our tests include reports on software redundant arrays of inexpensive disks – Level 5 (RAID-5) systems running under Linux 2.4 using Promise Ultra 133 disk controllers that allow disks larger than 137 GB. The 137 GB limit comes from 28-bit logical block addressing, which allows $`2^{28}`$ 512 byte blocks on IDE disks. Recently 48-bit logical block addressing has been implemented. RAID-5 protects data in case of a catastrophic single disk failure by providing parity bits. Journaling file systems are used to allow rapid recovery from system crashes.

Our data analysis strategy is to encapsulate data and CPU processing power together. Data is stored on many PCs. Analysis of a particular part of a data set takes place locally on, or close to, the PC where the data resides. The network backbone is only used to put results together. If the I/O overhead is moderate and analysis tasks need more than one local CPU to plow through data, then each of these disk arrays could be used as a local file server to a few computers sharing a local ethernet switch. These commodity 8-port gigabit ethernet switches would be combined with a single high end, fast backplane switch allowing the connection of a thousand PCs. We have also successfully tested using Network File System (NFS) software to connect our disk arrays to computers that cannot run Linux 2.4.

RAID RAID  stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Many industry offerings meet all of the qualifications except the inexpensive part, severely limiting the size of an array for a given budget. This is now changing. The different RAID levels can be defined as follow:

* RAID-0: “Striped.” Disks are combined into one physical device where reads and writes of data are done in parallel. Access speed is fast but there is no redundancy.
* RAID-1: “Mirrored.” Fully redundant, but the size is limited to the smallest disk.
* RAID-4: “Parity.” For $`N`$ disks, 1 disk is used as a parity bit and the remaining $`N1`$ disks are combined. Protects against a single disk failure but access speed is slow since you have to update the parity disk for each write. Some, but not all, files may be recoverable if two disks fail.
* RAID-5: “Striped-Parity.” As with RAID-4, the effective size is that of $`N1`$ disks. However, since the parity information is also distributed evenly among the $`N`$ drives the bottleneck of having to update the parity disk for each write is avoided. Protects against a single disk failure and the access speed is fast.

RAID-5, using enhanced integrated drive electronics (EIDE) disks under Linux software, is now available RAID5 . Redundant disk arrays do provide protection in the most likely single disk failure case, that in which a single disk simply stops working. This removes a major obstacle to building large arrays of EIDE disks. However, RAID-5 does not totally protect against other types of disk failures. RAID-5 will offer limited protection in the case where a single disk stops working but causes the whole EIDE bus to fail (or the whole EIDE controller card to fail), but only temporarily stops them from functioning. This would temporarily disable the whole RAID-5 array. If replacing the bad disk solves the problem, i.e. the failure did not permanently damage data on other disks, then the RAID-5 array would recover normally.

Similarly if only the controller card was damaged then replacing it would allow the RAID-5 array to recover normally. However, if more than one disk was damaged, especially if the file or directory structure information was damaged, the entire RAID-5 array would be damaged. The remaining failure mode would be for a disk to be delivering corrupted data. There is no protection for this inherent to RAID-5; however, a longitudinal parity check on the data, such as a checksum record count (CRC), could be built into event headers to flag the problem. Redundant copies of data that are very hard to recreate are still needed. RAID-5 does allow one to ignore backing up data that is only moderately hard to recreate.

## II Large Disks

In today’s marketplace, the cost per terabyte of disks with EIDE interfaces is about half that of disks with SCSI (Small Computer System Interface). The EIDE interface is limited to 2 drives on each bus and SCSI is limited to 7 (14 with wide SCSI). The only major drawback of EIDE disks is the limit in the length of cable connecting the drives to the drive controller. This limit is nominally 18 inches; however, we have successfully used 24 inch long cables star . Therefore, one is limited to about 10 disks per box for an array (or perhaps 20 with a “double tower”). To get a large RAID array one needs to use large capacity disk drives. There have been some problems with using large disks, primarily the maximum addressable size. We have addressed these problems in an earlier papers CHEP98 ; IEEE . Because of these concerns and because we wanted to put more drives into an array than could be supported by the motherboard we opted to use PCI disk controller cards. In the past we have tested both Promise Technologies ULTRA 66 and ULTRA 100 disk controller cards in RAID-5 disk arrays consisting of either 80 or 100 GB disksIEEE . Each of the PCI disk controller cards support four drives. We now report on our tests of the Promise Technologies ULTRA 133 TX2 Promise133  that supports disk drives with capacity greater than 137 GB.

Using arrays of disk drives, as shown in Table 1, the cost per terabyte is similar to that of cost of Storage Technology tape silos. However, RAID-5 arrays offer a lot better granularity since they are scalable down to a terabyte. For example, if you wanted to store 10 TB of data you would still have to pay about $1,000,000 for the tape silo but only $20,000 for a RAID-5 array. Thus, even small institutions can afford to deploy systems. And the Terabyte disk arrays can be used as caches to take full advantage of Grid Computing grid .

## III RAID Arrays

There exist disk controllers that implement RAID-5 protocols right in the controller, for example 3ware’s Escalade 7500 series 3ware , which will handle up to 12 EIDE drives. These controllers cost $600 and, at the time that we built the system shown in Table 3, did not support disk drives larger than 137 Gigabytes Kent . Therefore, we focused our attention on software RAID-5 implementations RAID5 ; HOWTO , which we tested extensively.

There are also various commercial RAID systems that rely on a hardware RAID controller. Examples of these are shown in Table 2. They are typically 3U or larger rack mounted systems. However, commercial systems have not been off-the-shelf commodity items. This is changing and the only drawback is that, even allowing for cost of assembly, they are anywhere from twice to over twenty-five times as expensive.

### III.1 Hardware

We now report on the use of disks with capacity greater than 137 GB. The drives we consider for use with a RAID-5 array are compared in Table 1. The disk we tested was the Maxtor D540X 160 GB disk maxtor540 . In general, the internal I/O speed of a disk is proportional to its rotational speed and increases as a function of platter capacity. One should note that the “spin–up” of these drives takes 1.8-2.5 Amps at 12 Volts (typically 22 W total for both 12 V and 5V).

When assembling an array we had to worry about the “spin-up” current draw on the 12V part of the power supply. With 8 disks in the array (plus the system disk) we would have exceeded the capacity of the power supply that came with our tower case, so we decided to add a second off-the-shelf power supply rather than buying a more expensive single supply. By using 2 power supplies we benefit from under loading the supplies. The benefits include both a longer lifetime and better cooling since the heat generated is distributed over 2 supplies, each with their own cooling fans. We used the hardware shown in Table 3 for our array test. Many of the components we chose are generic; thus, components from other manufacturers also work. We have measured the wall power consumption for the whole disk array box in Table 3. It uses 276 watts at startup and 156 watts during normal sustained running.

To install the second power supply we had to modify our tower case with a jigsaw and a hand drill. We also had to use a jumper to ground the green wire in the 20-pin block ATXPWR connector to fake the power-on switch.

When installing the two disk controller cards care had to be taken that they did not share interrupts with other highly utilized hardware such as the video card and the ethernet card. We also tried to make sure that they did not share interrupts with each other. There are 16 possible interrupt requests (IRQs) that allow the various devices, such as EIDE controllers, video cards, mice, serial, and parallel ports, to communicate with the CPU. Most PC operating systems allow sharing of IRQs but one would naturally want to avoid overburdening any one IRQ. There are also a special class of IRQs used by the PCI bus, they are called PCI IRQs (PIRQ). Each PCI card slot has 4 interrupt numbers. This means that they share some IRQs with the other slots; therefore, we had to juggle the cards we used (video, 2 EIDE controllers, and an ethernet).

When we tried to use a disk as a “Slave” on a motherboard EIDE bus, we found that it would not run at the full speed of the bus and slowed down the access speed of the entire RAID-5 array. This was a problem of either the motherboard’s basic input/output system (BIOS) or EIDE controller. This problem was not in evidence when using the disk controller cards. Therefore, we decided that rather than take a factor of 10 hit in the access speed we would rather use 8 instead of 9 hard disks.

### III.2 Software

For the actual tests we used Linux kernel 2.4.17 with the RedHat 7.2 (see http://www.redhat.com/) distribution (we had to upgrade the kernel to this level) and applied a patch to allow support for greater than 137 GB disks (see http://www.kernel.org/ and see http://www.linuxdiskcert.org/). The latest stable kernel version is 2.4.20 (see http://www.kernel.org/). We needed the 2.4.x kernel to allow full support for “Journaling” file systems. Journaling file systems provide rapid recovery from crashes. A computer can finish its boot-up at a normal speed, rather than waiting to perform a file system check (FSCK) on the entire RAID array. This is then conducted in the background allowing the user to continue to use the RAID array. There are now 4 different Linux Journaling file systems: XFS, a port from SGI XFS ; JFS, a port from IBM JFS ; ext3 ext3 , a Journalized version of the standard ext2 file system; and ReiserFS from namesys ReiserFS . Comparisons of these Journaling file systems have been done elsewhere Journaling . When we tested our RAID-5 arrays only ext3 and the ReiserFS were easily available for the 2.4.x kernel; therefore, we tested 2 different Journaling file systems; ReiserFS and ext3. We opted on using ext3 for two reasons: 1) At the time there were stability problems with ReiserFS and NFS (this has since been resolved with kernel 2.4.7) and 2) it was an extension of the standard ext2fs (it was originally developed for the 2.2 kernel) and, if synced properly could be mounted as ext2. Ext3 is the only one that will allow direct upgrading from ext2, this is why it is now the default for RedHat since 7.2.

NFS is a very flexible system that allows one to manage files on several computers inside a network as if they were on the local hard disk. So, there’s no need to know what actual file system they are stored under nor where the files are physically located in order to access them. Therefore, we use NFS to connect these disks arrays to computers that cannot run Linux 2.4. We have successfully used NFS to mount disk arrays on the following types of computers: a DECstation 5000/150 running Ultrix 4.3A, a Sun UltraSparc 10 running Solaris 7, a Macintosh G3 running MacOS X, and various Linux boxes with both the 2.2 and 2.4 kernels.

As an example, in Spring 2002 we built a pair of one Terabyte Linux RAID-5 arrays, as described in section III.1, to store CMS Monte Carlo data at CERN. They were mounted using NFS, via gigabit ethernet. They remotely served the random background data to the CMS Monte Carlo Computers, as if it was local. While this is not as efficient as serving the data directly, it is clearly a viable technique CMS-Note . We also are currently using two, NFS mounted, RAID-5 boxes, one at SLAC and one at the University of Mississippi, to run analysis software with the BaBar KANGA and CMS CMSIM/ORCA code.

We have performed a few simple speed tests. The first was “hdparm -tT /dev/xxx”. This test simply reads a 64 MB chunk of data and measures the speed. On a single drive we saw read/write speeds of about 30 MB/s. The whole array saw an increase to 95 MB/s. When we tried writing a text file using a simple FORTRAN program (we wrote “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” $`10^8`$ times), the speed was about 95 MB/s While mounted via NFS over 100 Mb/s ethernet the speed was 2.12 MB/s, limited by both the ethernet speed and the NFS communication overhead. In the past farm , we have been able to get much higher fractions of the rated ethernet bandwidth by using the lower level TCP/IP socket protocol TCPIP  in place of the higher level NFS protocol. TCP/IP sockets are more cumbersome to program, but are much faster.

We also tested what actually happens when a disk fails by turning the power off to one disk in our RAID-5 array. One could continue to read and write files, but in a “degraded” mode, that is without the parity safety net. When a blank disk was added to replace the failed disk, again one could continue to read and write files in a mode where the disk access speed is reduced while the system rebuilt the missing disk as a background job. This speed reduction in disk access was due to the fact that the parity regeneration is a major disk access in its own right. For more details, see reference HOWTO .

The performance of Linux IDE software drivers is improving. The latest standards t13  include support for command overlap, READ/WRITE direct memory access QUEUED commands, scatter/gather data transfers without intervention of the CPU, and elevator seeks. Command overlap is a protocol that allows devices that require extended command time to perform a bus release so that commands may be executed by the other device on the bus. Command queuing allows the host to issue concurrent commands to the same device. Elevator seeks minimize disk head movement by optimizing the order of I/O commands. The Hitachi/IBM 180GXP disk IBM180  supports elevator seeks under the new ATA6 standard t13 .

We did encounter a few problems. We had to modify “MAKEDEV” to allow for more than eight IDE devices, that is to allow for disks beyond “/dev/hdg”. For version 2.x one would have to actually modify the script; however, for version 3.x we just had to modify the file “/etc/makedev.d/ide”. This should no longer be a problem with newer releases of Linux.

Another problem was the 2 GB file size limit. Older operating system and compiler libraries used a 32 bit “long-integer” for addressing files; therefore, they could not normally address files larger than 2 GB ($`2^{31}`$). There are patches to the Linux 2.4 kernel and glibc but there are still some problems with NFS and not all applications use these patches.

We have found that the current underlying file systems (ext2, ext3, reiserfs) do not have a 2 GB file size limit. The limit for ext2/ext3 is in the petabytes. The 2.4 kernel series supports large files (64-bit offsets). Current versions of GNU libc support large files. However, by default the 32-bit offset interface is used. To use 64-bit offsets, C/C++ code must be recompiled with the following as the first line:

```
#define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64

```

or the code must use the \*64 functions (i.e. open becomes open64, etc.) if they exist. This functionality is not included in GNU FORTRAN (g77); however, it should be possible to write a simple wrapper C program to replace the OPEN statement (perhaps called open64). We have succeeded in writing files larger than 2 GB using a simple C program with “#define _ FILE\_ OFFSET\_ BITS 64” as the first line. This works over NFS version 3 but not version 2.

While RAID-5 is recoverable for a hardware failure, there is no protection against accidental deletion of files. To address this problem we suggest a simple script to replace the “rm” command. Rather than deleting files it would move them to a “/raid/Trash” or better yet a “/raid/.Trash” directory on the RAID-5 disk array (similar to the “Trash can” in the Macintosh OS). The system administrator could later purge them as space is needed using an algorithm based on criteria such as file size, file age, and user quota.

## IV High Energy Physics Strategy

We encapsulate data and CPU processing power. A block of real or Monte Carlo simulated data for an analysis is broken up into groups of events and distributed once to a set of RAID disk boxes, which each may also serve a few additional processors via a local 8-port gigabit ethernet switch (see Figure 1).

Examples of commodity gigabit ethernet switches and PCI adapters are seen in Table 4.

Dual processor boxes would also add more local CPU power. Events are stored on disks close to the CPUs that will process them to minimize I/O. Events are only moved once. Event parallel processing has a long history of success in high energy physics farm ; E769 ; Kunz . The data from each analysis are distributed among all the RAID arrays so all the computing power can be brought to bear on each analysis.

For example, in the case of an important analysis (such as a Higgs analysis), one could put 50 GB of data onto each of 100 RAID arrays and then bring the full computing power of 700 CPUs into play. Instances of an analysis job are run on each local cluster in parallel. Several analyses jobs may be running in memory or queued to each local cluster to level loads. The data volume of the results (e.g. histograms) is small and is gathered together over the network backbone. Results are examined and the analysis is rerun. The system is inherently fault tolerant. If three of a hundred clusters are down, one still gets 97% of the data and analysis is not impeded.

RAID-5 arrays should be treated as fairly secure, large, high-speed “scratch disks”. RAID-5 just means that disk data will be lost less frequently. Data which is very hard to re-create still needs to reside on tape. The inefficiency of an offline tape vault can be an advantage. Its harder to erase your entire raw data set with a single keystroke, if thousands of tapes have to be physically mounted. Someone may ask why all the write protect switches are being reset before all is lost. Its the same reason the Air Force has real people with keys in ICBM silos.

The granularity offered by RAID-5 arrays allows a university or small experiment in a laboratory to set up a few terabyte computer farm, while allowing a large Analysis Site or Laboratory to set up a few hundred terabyte or a petabyte computer system. For a large site, they would not necessarily have to purchase the full system at once, but buy and install the system in smaller parts. This would have two advantages, primarily they would be able to spread the cost over a few years and secondly, given the rapid increase in both CPU power and disk size, one could get the best “bang for the buck”.

What would be required to build a 1/4 petabyte system (similar size as a tape silo)? Start with eight 250 GB Maxtor disks in a box. The Promise Ultra133 card allows one to exceed the 137 GB limit. Each box provides 7 $`\times `$ 250 GB = 1750 GB of usable RAID-5 disk space in addition to a CPU for computations. 280 terabytes is reached with 161 boxes. Use 23 commodity 8-port gigabit ethernet switches ($170 each) to connect the 161 boxes to a 24-port commodity gigabit ethernet switch. See Figure 2.

This could easily fit in a room that was formerly occupied by a few old Mainframes, say an area of about a hundred square meters. The power consumption would be 25 kilowatts, 45 kilowatts if they all start up at once. One would need to build up operational experience for smooth running. As newer disks arrive that hold yet more data, even a petabyte system would become feasible. If one still needed more processing power per RAID array you could substitute for each RAID-5 CPU shown in Figure 2, 6 CPUs plus 1 RAID-5 CPU connected by an 8-port gigabit ethernet switch as described in Figure 1. Multiple CPUs per motherboard provide another alternative to adjust the disk space to processing power ratio.

Grid Computing grid  will entail the movement of large amounts of data between various sites. RAID-5 arrays will be needed as disk caches both during the transfer and when it reaches its final destination. Another example that can apply to Grid Computing is the Fermilab Mass Storage System, Enstore enstore , where RAID arrays are used as a disk cache for a Tape Silo. Enstore uses RAID arrays to stage tapes to disk allowing faster analysis of large data sets.

## V Conclusion

We have tested redundant arrays of IDE disk drives for use in offline high energy physics data analysis and Monte Carlo simulations. Parts costs of total systems using commodity IDE disks are now at the $2000 per terabyte level, a lower cost per terabyte than Storage Technology tape silos. The disks, however, offer much better granularity; even small institutions can afford them. The faster access of disk versus tape is a major added bonus. We have tested software RAID-5 systems running under Linux 2.4 using Promise Ultra 133 disk controllers. RAID-5 provides parity bits to protect data in case of a single catastrophic disk failure. Tape backup is not required for data that can be recreated with modest effort. Journaling file systems permit rapid recovery from crashes. Our data analysis strategy is to encapsulate data and CPU processing power. Data is stored on many PCs. Analysis for a particular part of a data set takes place locally on the PC where the data resides. The network is only used to put results together. Commodity 8-port gigabit ethernet switches combined with a single high end, fast backplane switch cisco  would allow one to connect over a thousand PCs, each with a terabyte of disk space. Some tasks may need more than one CPU to go through the data even on one RAID array. For such tasks dual CPUs and/or several boxes on one local 8-port ethernet switch should be adequate and avoids overwhelming the backbone switching fabric connecting an entire installation. Again the backbone is only used to put results together.

Current high energy physics experiments, such as BaBar at SLAC, feature relatively low data acquisition rates, only 3 MB/s, less than a third of the rates taken at Fermilab fixed target experiments a decade ago farm . The Large Hadron Collider experiments CMS and Atlas, with data acquisition rates starting at 100 MB/s, will be more challenging and require physical architectures that minimize helter skelter data movement if they are to fulfill their promise. In many cases, architectures designed to solve particular processing problems are far more cost effective than general solutions farm ; E769 . As Steve Wolbers in his talk at CHEP03 Wolbers  reminded us, all data processing groups can not depend on Moore’s Law to save them. Data acquisition groups want to write out additional interesting events. Programmers like to adopt new languages that are further abstracted from the CPUs running them. Small objects and pointers seem to find their way into code. Machines hate to interrupt pipelines and love direct addressing. Universities want networks to transfers billions of events quickly. Even Gordon Moore may not be able to do all of this simultaneously. Efficiency may still be useful. Designing time critical code metcalf , regardless of the language chosen, to fit into larger blocks without pointers can increase speed by a factor of 10 to 100. Code to methodically bit-pack events into the minimum possible size may be worth writing bracker . If events are smaller, more can be stored on a given disk and more can be transferred over a given network in a day. All of this requires planning at an early stage. No software package will generate it automatically.

Techniques explored in this paper, physically encapsulating data and CPUs together, may be useful. Terabyte disk arrays at small institutions are now feasible. Computing has progressed since the days when science was done by punching a few kilobytes into paper tape lasker .

###### Acknowledgements.

Many thanks to S. Bracker, J. Izen, L. Lueking, R. Mount, M. Purohit, W. Toki, and T. Wildish for their help and suggestions. This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under Grant Nos. DE-FG05-91ER40622 and DE-AC02-76CH03000.


text:
# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

Of the various motivations for supersymmetry, perhaps none is more powerful than its ability to stabilize disparate scales in a natural way. Unfortunately, the supersymmetric cure to the quadratic-sensitivity malady has introduced several iatrogenic illnesses. Results from flavor changing neutral current experiments ($`K\overline{K}`$ mixing, $`\mu e\gamma `$, etc.), CP violation experiments (e.g., electric dipole moments of the neutron and electron), and Higgs mass searches ($`m_h>114\mathrm{GeV}`$ at 95% C.L.) all struggle to be consistent with low-scale supersymmetry. One must make additional assumptions about the superpartner spectrum, such as the squarks must be degenerate and CP phases of superpartner parameters ($`\mu `$, gaugino masses, $`A`$-terms) must be nearly zero. Proton decay is another problem. Proposed solutions based on natural R-parity arguments mollify dimension-four concerns, but dimension-five operators still frighten the grand unified theory enthusiasts.

It is often assumed that superpartner masses need to be less than about $`1\mathrm{TeV}`$ if the weak scale is not fine-tuned. The problem is that no one has a rigorous and defensible definition for “about”. If superpartner masses are at $`10^8\mathrm{TeV}`$ most would agree that supersymmetry would have little to do with stabilizing the weak scale to the quadratic divergences of the Standard Model (SM) effective theory. But what about $`3\mathrm{TeV}`$ or $`48\mathrm{TeV}`$? In the Yukawa coupling sector we have an apparent tuning of $`y_e/y_t=m_e/m_t3\times 10^6`$. If $`\stackrel{~}{m}150\mathrm{TeV}`$ we have a similar apparent finetuning in the electroweak sector of $`v^2/\stackrel{~}{m}^2y_e/y_t`$. This is not a complete argument, but rather a meek invitation to be less restrictive in thinking about what is finetuned since an apparent finetuning might not be a real finetuning once we learn more about the origin of Yukawa couplings and superpartner masses.

The primary phenomenological motivation for considering a trans-TeV superpartner spectrum is that it automatically solves most of the above-mentioned illnesses of supersymmetry. Several approaches along these lines have been presented in the literature, with heavy emphasis on naturalness arguments. Most emphasize heavy first two generation scalars -, while others lift all three generation scalars .

In any case, electric dipole moments of the neutron and electron are suppressed to well below experimental limits with trans-TeV squarks and pseudo-scalar Higgs. Kaon physics and B physics are identical to the Standard Model within current experimental sensitivities if the squarks are sufficiently massive — tens of TeV for kaon physics, less for B physics.

Another soothing effect of the little hierarchy of scalars to gauginos is the suppression of proton decay in supersymmetric grand unified theories. As the squark masses increase, the troubling dimension-five proton decay operators are suppressed and proton decay is much less of a concern . In ordinary supergravity models with a Bino lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP), the relic abundance increases to unacceptable levels in much of parameter space when the scalar masses are increased. This is because the Bino annihilates most efficiently through $`t`$-channel sleptons, but when those masses are too high the annihilation efficiency drops and the relic abundance climbs very high such that the universe is matter dominated too early. We will see shortly that the supersymmetry spectrum discussed in this letter gives the Wino the honor of being the LSP. The Wino LSP annihilates very efficiently through ordinary gauge bosons and so the masses of the scalars are mostly irrelevant to dark matter issues. More will be said about the dark matter situation in a subsequent section.

Yet another soothing effect of heavy scalars is the compatibility with the Higgs boson mass constraint. If all scalar superpartner masses are above $`5\mathrm{TeV}`$ the lightest Higgs mass boson is generally always above $`114\mathrm{GeV}`$ for all values of $`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$ consistent with perturbative top and bottom Yukawa couplings up to the GUT scale. Thus, the interesting low-$`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$ quasi-infrared fixed point region close to $`\mathrm{tan}\beta 2`$ can be reincarnated without worrying about the Higgs mass.

The primary theoretical motivation for considering a trans-TeV superpartner spectrum is the rather large hierarchy generated between superpartner scalars and gauginos when there is no singlet to feel and transmit supersymmetry breaking. Supersymmetry breaking can be parametrized by a chiral supermultiplet $`S=S+\sqrt{2}\psi \theta +F_S\theta ^2`$ whose non-zero $`F_S`$ component is the source of supersymmetry breaking. Gaugino masses are generated via

$$d^2\theta \frac{S}{M_{\mathrm{Pl}}}𝒲𝒲m_{3/2}\lambda \lambda $$
(1)
where $`m_{3/2}=F_S/M_{\mathrm{Pl}}`$. The scalar masses are generated by

$$d^2\theta d^2\overline{\theta }\frac{S^{}S}{M_{\mathrm{Pl}}^2}\mathrm{\Phi }_i^{}\mathrm{\Phi }_im_{3/2}^2\varphi _i^{}\varphi _i.$$
(2)
If $`S`$ is charged (i.e., not a singlet), eq. 2 is unaffected, whereas eq. 1 is no longer gauge invariant. (I am neglecting the grand unified theory possibility that a representation of $`S`$ charged under the unified group paired with that of the $`\mathrm{Adj}^2`$ contains a singlet .) This is the generic expectation in dynamical supersymmetry breaking where supersymmetry breaking order parameters are charged and singlets are hard to come by .

In this case the leading-order contribution to the gaugino mass is the anomaly-mediated value ,

$$M_\lambda =\frac{\beta (g_\lambda )}{g_\lambda }m_{3/2}$$
(3)
where $`\lambda `$ labels the three SM gauge group. The gaugino masses are therefore one-loop suppressed compared to the persisting scalar mass result of eq. 2. Some phenomenological implications of this anomaly-mediated scenario with heavier squark masses was presented in .

Charged supersymmetry breaking therefore creates a one-loop hierarchy between the gaugino masses (and $`A`$ terms) and the scalar superpartners. With finetuning issues in play, attempts have been made to suppress the scalar masses via a specialized Kähler potential of the no-scale variety. Brane separations in extra dimensions was one hope for this scenario , but it looks less likely when more complete models are constructed . String theory might provide other ways to suppress the scalar mass below $`m_{3/2}`$ . Although ideas along these lines might work out, the phenomenology presented here is of the simplest version of the model where scalar masses are near the gravitino mass.

## 2 Superpartner Spectrum

The numerical values of the light gaugino spectrum are

$`M_1`$ $``$ $`m_{3/2}/120`$ (4)
$`M_2`$ $``$ $`m_{3/2}/360`$ (5)
$`M_3`$ $``$ $`m_{3/2}/45.`$ (6)
As discussed above, the heavy superpartner spectrum of squark, slepton and sneutrino masses $`\stackrel{~}{m}_i`$ should have masses within factors of $`𝒪(1)`$ near the gravitino mass $`m_{3/2}`$,

$$\stackrel{~}{m}_im_{3/2}(\mathrm{scalar}\mathrm{masses})$$
(7)
unless there is a suppression from a special Kähler potential.

In minimal supergravity the region $`m_0m_{1/2}`$ is the closest match to the spectrum outlined above. It is well-known that radiative electroweak symmetry breaking does not work well in this region. The origin of the problem is universal soft masses. When the Higgs and top squark masses are all the same at the high scale, one needs a significant $`m_{1/2}`$ to feed into the top squark mass to make it much heavier than the Higgs soft masses at the low scale. This drives $`m_{H_u}^2`$ negative from loop effects, which enables the theory to satisfy the radiative electroweak symmetry breaking constraint equation,

$$\frac{1}{2}m_Z^2+\mu ^2=\frac{m_{H_d}^2m_{H_u}^2\mathrm{tan}^2\beta }{\mathrm{tan}^2\beta 1}$$
(8)
If $`m_0m_{1/2}`$ one finds that $`m_{1/2}`$ effects are insignificant for the top squark, and loop effects are not big enough to drive electroweak symmetry breaking.

However, universality is not needed in any way for the heavy scalar spectrum of supersymmetry considered here, and one can readily identify generic properties of the superpartner spectrum that would give radiative electroweak symmetry breaking. At the high scale, if the soft masses satisfy,

$$m_{H_u}^2<m_{H_d}^2<m_{\stackrel{~}{t}}^2,$$
(9)
electroweak symmetry breaking normally will develop — this ordering of masses makes it easier to satisfy eq. 8.

The only problem left to have a full understanding of electroweak symmetry breaking is the origin of the $`\mu `$ term. Here, I offer no special insights into this recurring problem in supersymmetric theories; however, there are many ideas one can contemplate to explain the origin of the $`\mu `$ term in this context . To be conservative in the subsequent phenomenology discussion, I will assume that $`\mu \stackrel{~}{m}_i`$. If $`\mu m_Z`$, additional higgsino superpartner states may be accessible, and detectibility would be enhanced in the discussion that follows.

## 3 Collider Searches

For colliders, the most important implication is that gauginos are the only superpartners accessible. The neutral Wino $`\stackrel{~}{W}^0`$ is the lightest supersymmetric partner (LSP), and its charged gauge partner $`\stackrel{~}{W}^\pm `$ is very close by in mass. The mass splitting in the limit of very massive $`\mu `$ term is

$$m_{\pi ^\pm }<m_{\stackrel{~}{W}^\pm }m_{\stackrel{~}{W}^0}<165\mathrm{MeV}$$
(10)
as long as $`m_{\stackrel{~}{W}}>80\mathrm{GeV}`$. This is the maximally most challenging mass splitting for experiment because it is too large for $`\stackrel{~}{W}^\pm `$ to be long-lived, which would generate a spectacular signature of a long, rigid charged track decaying into a curling-up pion, and it is too small to yield energetic and triggerable decay products $`X`$ in $`\stackrel{~}{W}^\pm \stackrel{~}{W}^0+X`$ decays.

Analysis have been done at LEP , and the result is that $`m_{\stackrel{~}{W}^\pm }>88\mathrm{GeV}`$. Searches at the Tevatron are more difficult and focus on the production of $`\stackrel{~}{W}^+\stackrel{~}{W}^{}+\mathrm{jet}`$. If one can trigger on a jet in the events where its transverse energy is high enough and then at the analysis stage look for curled-track soft pions in the saved events, there is some hope of discovery. However, it is unlikely that sensitivities will exceed that of the LEP II results .

Analyses at the LHC should focus on gluino production. In minimal supergravity the primary source of jets plus missing transverse energy is gluino production in association with squarks. However, there are no accessible squarks here, and we therefore must ask how well gluino pair production alone can probe gluino masses.

Fig. 1 shows the expected production cross-section of gluino pairs at the $`14\mathrm{TeV}`$ LHC in the applicable limit of much heavier squark masses . All events from $`\stackrel{~}{g}\stackrel{~}{g}`$ production will produce at least four jets plus missing energy. This is a spectacular signature in that draconian cuts on SM background can still allow passage of the majority of the signal. One LHC year at low luminosity is expected to be about $`10\mathrm{fb}^1`$. Accumulating $`100\mathrm{fb}^1`$ of data enables probes of the gluino up to an estimated mass scale of $`2\mathrm{TeV}`$. Such a high gluino mass would correspond to a Wino mass of just over $`700\mathrm{GeV}`$ and scalar superpartner masses of nearly $`100\mathrm{TeV}`$. Therefore, a $`2\mathrm{TeV}`$ gluino search is certainly more than impressive from a weak-scale naturalness point of view.

The decay branching fractions of the gluino are usually three body through virtual squarks. Two-body loop decays $`\stackrel{~}{g}g\chi _i^0`$  are negligible in the limit that all squarks are equal in mass and the $`\mu `$ term is large compared to the gaugino masss. However, if the top squarks are split and more than a factor of two lighter than the other squarks one could get a sizeable $`B(\stackrel{~}{g}g\chi _i^0)`$ of several tens of percent. In all cases, the branching fractions are sensitive to the relative mass ordering of the squarks. For example, if the top squarks are lighter than other squarks, as would be generally expected through renormalization group running effects, one finds that gluino decays will produce a high-multiplicity of top quarks. This lends itself to discovery-friendly final states such as

$$pp\stackrel{~}{g}\stackrel{~}{g}tt\overline{t}\overline{t}\stackrel{~}{W}^0\stackrel{~}{W}^0\mathrm{and}tt\overline{b}\overline{b}\stackrel{~}{W}^{}\stackrel{~}{W}^{},\mathrm{etc}.$$
(11)
The $`\stackrel{~}{W}^{}`$ acts like a charged LSP in these events as it escapes all detection because its SM decay products are too soft. Both final states listed above come with plenty of missing energy for further discrimination from the Standard Model.

## 4 Dark Matter

In ordinary minimal supergravity the lightest superpartner is the bino, superpartner of the hypercharge gauge boson. The thermal relic abundance of this sparticle is more or less compatible with the universe’s cold dark matter needs in much of the parameter space . The price one pays for this success is the gravitino and moduli problem. The gravitino, which is roughly the same mass as the LSP, decays during big bang nucleosynthesis if its mass is less than a few TeV. The gravitino and moduli must be inflated away and not regenerated too copiously during the reheat phase in this scenario.

However, in our situation with anomaly-mediated gaugino masses, the Wino is the LSP, which annihilates and coannihilates very efficiently through SM gauge bosons. The thermal relic abundance is

$$\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{th}}h^25\times 10^4\left(\frac{M_2}{100\mathrm{GeV}}\right)^2$$
(12)
and is cosmologically insignificant for weak-scale gauginos. However, if the Wino LSP mass is above about $`2.5\mathrm{TeV}`$ one finds that the thermal relic abundance is unacceptably high. If all notions of finetuning are rejected this would be perhaps the most important bound on the entire superpartner spectrum in this scenario.

In this little hierarchy of scalars to gauginos, the gravitino mass is necessarily in the tens of TeV region. Since it decays gravitationally, knowledge of its mass is all that is needed to compute the decay lifetime. The decays take place after the putative freeze-out time but before big bang nucleosynthesis. Besides being an interesting solution to the gravitino/moduli problem of weak-scale supersymmetry, it also generates a non-thermal gravitino and moduli decay source for relic LSPs , which can naturally account for all the cold dark matter.

Detecting Wino dark matter when squarks and the $`\mu `$-term are in the tens of TeV is not possible with table-top detectors of LSP-nucleon scattering. The coherent scattering cross-section falls like $`1/\mu ^2`$. In other words, a Higgsino component of the LSP is necessary to be sensitive to LSP-Nucleon interactions, and since the LSP is nearly pure Wino the higgsino component is not available for service. The spin-dependent contribution goes to zero as the $`\mu `$ term and the sfermions are very heavy and so they also do not contribute to scattering. Therefore, the dark matter is invisible to table-top experiments.

However, Winos annihilate very efficiently and so one expects that all experiments looking for LSP annihilations in the galactic halo would have an enhanced sensitivity. For example, annihilations that produce $`\overline{p}`$’s and $`e^+`$’s are enhanced. The annihilation channel that perhaps gains the most if nature has Wino dark matter is the monochromatic two-photon final state . The wino annihilation rate is even higher than the higgsino rate, which is known to be large. The cross-section for Winos annihilating into two photons  is a fairly constant value

$$2\sigma v(\gamma \gamma )=(35)\times 10^{27}\mathrm{cm}^3\mathrm{s}^1$$
(13)
for $`m_{\stackrel{~}{W}^0}=0.1\mathrm{TeV}1\mathrm{TeV}`$.

The virialized dark matter is moving at non-relativistic speeds of only a few hundred kilometers per second, and so the photons that result from this annihilation are monochromatic with energy $`E_\gamma =m_{\stackrel{~}{W}^0}`$. Under some astrophysical models developed independently of dark-matter detection prospecting, the combination of GLAST and next generation Cerenkov detectors may be able to see a signal for cross-sections above $`3\times 10^{27}\mathrm{cm}^3\mathrm{s}^1`$ for all dark matter masses between $`100\mathrm{GeV}`$ and $`1\mathrm{TeV}`$ . This bodes well for detecting Wino LSPs. Another photon line from annihilations into $`Z\gamma `$ might also be detectable at the energy

$$E_\gamma =m_{\stackrel{~}{W}^0}\left(1\frac{m_Z^2}{4m_{\stackrel{~}{W}^0}^2}\right)(\mathrm{from}\stackrel{~}{W}^0\stackrel{~}{W}^0Z\gamma ).$$
(14)
Detecting a monochromatic photon line at the mass of the LSP would be a tremendous aid to our understanding of what is happening at the LHC. In some circumstances at the LHC, mass differences of sparticles can be measured to sub-GeV precision . However, measuring the overall mass of a sparticle is difficult. A monochromatic photon line from LSP annihilations in the galactic halo would not only announce the the discovery of dark matter, an important qualitative result, but it would also give us a very valuable number otherwise difficult to obtain: the mass of the LSP.

## 5 Conclusions

There are other theoretical and phenomenological implications of a little hierarchy between the gauginos and scalars. For example, recently it has been understood that $`b`$-$`\tau `$-$`t`$ unification works well for very large values of $`\mathrm{tan}\beta 50`$ but small finite $`b`$-quark mass corrections . This can be obtained naturally, from the Yukawa unification point of view, if scalar superpartners are very heavy. Furthermore, gauge coupling unification in the supersymmetric standard model is more exacting at the high-scale (i.e., less high-scale slop needed) when the superpartners are in the multi-TeV region , although when supersymmetry gets too high (hundreds of TeV and above) the compatibility with gauge coupling unification fades.

The unification successes of supersymmetry, both gauge and Yukawa unification, are not diminished when the scalars are very heavy. We have also seen that supersymmetric dark matter considerations do not cast dispersions on the idea either. Only the naturalness of the electroweak symmetry breaking potential apparently weakens with the increased scalar masses considered here. Interestingly, this aspect of supersymmetry is the least quantifiable success of supersymmetry, and it may be that data will end up adjusting what we presume as natural.

Acknowledgments:  This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.