Squark Production at the Tevatron

Abstract

We have determined the QCD corrections to the production of squark-antisquark pairs in $p\bar p$ collisions at the Tevatron. If the next-to-leading order corrections are taken into account, the renormalization/factorization scale dependence of the theoretical prediction for the cross section is reduced considerably. The higher order corrections increase the production cross section at the Tevatron by about a factor two if we compare the next-to-leading order prediction at a scale near the squark mass with the lowest order prediction for which, in the experimental analyses, the scale was identified with the invariant energy of the parton subprocess. This results in a rise of the experimental lower bound on the squark mass from the Tevatron by about $20$ GeV.