Squark and gluino production at hadron colliders Original Research Article

We have determined the theoretical predictions for the cross sections of squark and gluino production at pp and pp colliders (Tevatron and LHC) in next-to-leading order of supersymmetric QCD. By reducing the dependence on the renormalization/factorization scale considerably, the theoretically predicted values for the cross sections are much more stable if these higher-order corrections are implemented. If squarks and gluinos are discovered, this improved stability translates into a reduced error on the masses, as extracted experimentally from the size of the production cross sections. The cross sections increase significantly if the next-to-leading order corrections are included at a renormalization/factorization scale near the average mass of the produced massive particles. This rise results in improved lower bounds on squark and gluino masses. By contrast, the shape of the transverse-momentum and rapidity distributions remains nearly unchanged when the next-to-leading order corrections are included.