Next-to-leading order cross sections for new heavy fermion production at hadron colliders

Abstract

We evaluate the cross sections for new heavy fermion production at three Large Hadron Collider energies accurate to next-to-leading order in perturbative quantum chromodynamics. We treat the cases of pair production of heavy quarks via strong interactions, single heavy quark production via electroweak interactions, and the production of heavy leptons. Theoretical uncertainties associated with the choice of the renormalization scale and the parton distribution functions are specified. We derive a simple and useful parameterization of our results which should facilitate phenomenological studies of new physics models that predict new heavy quarks and/or leptons.