Electroweak Contributions to Squark Pair Production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper calculates electroweak effects on squark pair production at the LHC, revealing significant contributions that can alter production rates by up to 55%, especially for SU(2) doublet squarks.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed computation of electroweak contributions, including gauge boson and gaugino exchanges, to squark pair production at hadron colliders.

Findings

Electroweak contributions can reach up to 55% of the production rate.

Significant interference effects with QCD contributions are observed.

Electroweak effects are about 3.5 times smaller than total squark production.

Abstract

In this paper we compute electroweak contributions to the production of squark pairs at hadron colliders. These include the exchange of electroweak gauge bosons in the s-channel as well as electroweak gaugino exchange in the t- and/or u-channel. In many cases these can interfere with the dominant QCD contributions. As a result, we find sizable contributions to the production of two SU(2) doublet squarks. At the LHC, they amount to 10 to 20% for typical mSUGRA (or CMSSM) scenarios, but in more general scenarios they can vary between -40 and +55%, depending on size and sign of the SU(2) gaugino mass. The electroweak contribution to the total squark pair production rate at the LHC is about 3.5 times smaller.