Electroweak contributions to squark pair production at the CERN LHC

Abstract

In this paper we compute electroweak contributions to the production of squark pairs at hadron colliders. These include the exchange of electroweak gauge bosons in the $s$-channel as well as electroweak gaugino exchange in the $t$- and/or $u$-channel. In many cases these can interfere with the dominant QCD contributions. As a result, we find sizable contributions to the production of two $SU(2)$ doublet squarks. At the LHC, they amount to 10% to 20% for typical mSUGRA (or CMSSM) scenarios, but in more general scenarios they can vary between $\ensuremath{-}40%$ and $+55%$, depending on size and sign of the $SU(2)$ gaugino mass. The electroweak contribution to the total squark pair production rate at the LHC is about 3.5 times smaller.