NLL soft and Coulomb resummation for squark and gluino production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper provides advanced predictions for squark and gluino production cross sections at the LHC by incorporating NLL resummation of threshold logarithms and Coulomb effects, improving accuracy and reducing uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive NLL resummation framework including Coulomb and bound-state effects for squark and gluino production at the LHC, extending previous fixed-order calculations.

Findings

Resummation increases cross sections by 15-30%.

Coulomb corrections can surpass soft-gluon effects.

Theoretical uncertainties are reduced to about 10%.

Abstract

We present predictions of the total cross sections for pair production of squarks and gluinos at the LHC, including the stop-antistop production process. Our calculation supplements full fixed-order NLO predictions with resummation of threshold logarithms and Coulomb singularities at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy, including bound-state effects. The numerical effect of higher-order Coulomb terms can be as big or larger than that of soft-gluon corrections. For a selection of benchmark points accessible with data from the 2010-2012 LHC runs, resummation leads to an enhancement of the total inclusive squark and gluino production cross section in the 15-30 % range. For individual production processes of gluinos, the corrections can be much larger. The theoretical uncertainty in the prediction of the hard-scattering cross sections is typically reduced to the 10 % level.