Single (anti-)top quark production in association with a lightest neutralino at LHeC

TL;DR

This paper calculates the next-to-leading order QCD corrections for single (anti-)top quark production with a neutralino at the LHeC, revealing significant effects on cross sections and distributions within the R-parity violating MSSM.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive NLO QCD analysis of this process without assuming production-decay factorization in the R-parity violating MSSM.

Findings

NLO QCD corrections generally increase the LO cross sections.

Transverse momentum distributions are significantly affected by NLO corrections.

Production rates remain sizable within current experimental constraints.

Abstract

In this paper we examine thoroughly the single (anti-)top quark production associated with a lightest neutralino at the possible CERN Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC). We calculate the full next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to the process including all the nonresonant diagrams and do not assume the production and decay factorization for the possible resonant top squarks in the R-parity violating minimal supersymmetric standard model with 19 unrelated parameters. We investigate numerically the effects of the relevant supersymmetry (SUSY) parameters on the cross section, and present the transverse momentum distributions of final (anti-)top quark at both the leading-order (LO) and the QCD NLO. We find that the NLO QCD corrections enhance the LO cross sections in most chosen parameter space, and the NLO QCD impacts on the transverse momentum distributions of the final (anti-)top quark might be resolvable in some cases. We conclude that even with recently known experimental constraints the on SUSY parameters, the production rate could still achieve notable value in the admissible parameter space.