Pair Production of Scalar Leptoquarks at the LHC to NLO Parton Shower Accuracy

TL;DR

This paper calculates scalar leptoquark pair production at the LHC at NLO accuracy, incorporating parton shower effects, providing detailed distributions, cross sections, and uncertainties for 13 TeV collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a NLO+PS simulation of scalar leptoquark pair production at the LHC, including decay and shower effects, with publicly available code.

Findings

NLO cross sections and K-factors for various energies

Kinematic distributions with scale uncertainties

Impact of parton shower on final states

Abstract

We present the scalar leptoquark pair production process at the LHC computed at the next-to-leading order in QCD, matched to the PYTHIA parton shower using the MC@NLO formalism. We consider the leading order decay of a leptoquark to a lepton ($e,\mu,\tau$ or $\nu_e,\nu_\mu,\nu_\tau$) and a jet and observe the effects of parton shower on the final states. For demonstration, we display the kinametical distributions of a selection of observables along with their scale uncertainties for the 13 TeV LHC. We also present pair production cross sections and $K$-factors using massless five-quark flavor scheme for different LHC center-of-mass energies. The complete stand-alone code is available online.