Next-to-Leading Order Cross Sections for New Heavy Fermion Production at Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading order cross sections for producing new heavy fermions at the LHC, providing precise theoretical predictions for various production modes to aid new physics searches.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive NLO calculations for heavy fermion production at hadron colliders, including parameterizations for practical phenomenological use.

Findings

NLO cross sections for heavy quark pair production.

NLO cross sections for single heavy quark production.

NLO cross sections for heavy lepton production.

Abstract

We evaluate the cross sections for new heavy fermion production at three Large Hadron Collider energies accurate to next-to-leading order in perturbative quantum chromodynamics. We treat the cases of pair production of heavy quarks via strong interactions, single heavy quark production via electroweak interactions, and the production of heavy leptons. Theoretical uncertainties associated with the choice of the renormalization scale and the parton distribution functions are specified. We derive a simple and useful parameterization of our results which should facilitate phenomenological studies of new physics models that predict new heavy quarks and/or leptons.