Precision predictions for exotic lepton production at the Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper provides precise predictions for exotic lepton pair production at the LHC, including higher-order QCD corrections and advanced resummation techniques, improving accuracy and reducing uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces new NLO QCD calculations with matching to parton showers and resummation for exotic leptons, with publicly available model implementations.

Findings

Cross sections increase significantly over LO predictions

Differential distribution shapes are distorted

Scale uncertainties are substantially reduced

Abstract

We calculate total and differential cross sections for the pair production, at the Large Hadron Collider, of exotic leptons that could emerge from models with vector-like leptons and in Type-III seesaw scenarios. Our predictions include next-to-leading-order QCD corrections, and we subsequently match them with either parton showers, or threshold resummation at the next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. Our results show an important increase of the cross sections relative to the leading-order predictions, exhibit a distortion of the shapes for various differential distributions, and feature a significant reduction of the scale uncertainties. Our predictions have been obtained from new FeynRules model implementations and associated UFO model libraries. This completes the set of next-to-leading-order implementations of new physics models featuring extra leptons that are publicly available on the FeynRules model database.