Electroweakino pair production at the LHC: NLO SUSY-QCD corrections and parton-shower effects

Abstract

We present a set of NLO SUSY-QCD calculations for the pair production of neutralinos and charginos at the LHC, and their matching to parton-shower programs in the framework of the POWHEG-BOX program package. The code we have developed provides a SUSY Les Houches Accord interface for setting supersymmetric input parameters. Decays of the neutralinos and charginos and parton-shower effects can be simulated with PYTHIA. To illustrate the capabilities of our program, we present phenomenological results for a representative SUSY parameter point. We find that NLO-QCD corrections increase the production rates for neutralinos and charginos significantly. The impact of parton-shower effects on distributions of the weakinos is small, but non-negligible for jet distributions.

20 pages, 9 figures. v2: minor changes in text and references, matches published version