Radiative corrections to stoponium annihilation decays

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading order QCD corrections to stoponium decay modes, revealing a significant decrease in the diphoton branching ratio and improved theoretical stability, impacting the potential for detecting stoponium at colliders.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed NLO QCD calculations of stoponium decay branching ratios, crucial for experimental searches at the LHC.

Findings

NLO corrections reduce the diphoton branching ratio significantly.

Theoretical predictions show improved renormalization-scale dependence.

Results impact the feasibility of observing stoponium via diphoton decay.

Abstract

The lighter top squark in supersymmetry can live long enough to form hadronic bound states if it has no kinematically allowed two-body decays that conserve flavor. In this case, scalar stoponium may be observable through its diphoton decay mode at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, enabling a uniquely precise measurement of the top-squark mass. The viability of the signal depends crucially on the branching ratio to diphotons. We compute the next-to-leading order QCD radiative corrections to stoponium annihilation decays to hadrons, photons, and Higgs scalar bosons. We find that the effect of these corrections is to significantly decrease the predicted branching ratio to the important diphoton channel. We also find a greatly improved renormalization-scale dependence of the diphoton branching ratio prediction.