QCD-resummation and non-minimal flavour-violation for supersymmetric particle production at hadron colliders

Abstract

Cross sections for supersymmetric particles production at hadron colliders have been extensively studied in the past at leading order and also at next-to-leading order of perturbative QCD. The radiative corrections include large logarithms which have to be resummed to all orders in the strong coupling constant in order to get reliable perturbative results. In this work, we perform a first and extensive study of the resummation effects for supersymmetric particle pair production at hadron colliders. We focus on Drell-Yan like slepton-pair and slepton-sneutrino associated production in minimal supergravity and gauge-mediated supersymmetry-breaking scenarios, and present accurate transverse-momentum and invariant-mass distributions, as well as total cross sections. In non-minimal supersymmetric models, novel effects of flavour violation may occur. In this case, the flavour structure in the squark sector cannot be directly deduced from the trilinear Yukawa couplings of the fermion and Higgs supermultiplets. We perform a precise numerical analysis of the experimentally allowed parameter space in the case of minimal supergravity scenarios with non-minimal flavour violation, looking for regions allowed by low-energy, electroweak precision, and cosmological data. Leading order cross sections for the production of squarks and gauginos at hadron colliders are implemented in a flexible computer program, allowing us to study in detail the dependence of these cross sections on flavour violation.