Higgs-mediated Slepton Pair-production at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

At the LHC, directly pair-produced sleptons may be easier to identify than those arising in cascade decays of squarks or gluinos. Higgs exchange processes leading to such slepton pair-production are calculated to one-loop in the MSSM. It turns out, surprisingly, that their total contribution can dominate the usual Drell-Yan production in certain regions of the parameter space. In particular, an interesting region with low $\tan \beta$ is covered by the dominant exchange of the heavier neutral scalar $H^0$.