Electroweak Contributions to Squark Pair Production

Abstract

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 -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.