Higgsino and gaugino pair production at the LHC with aNNLO+NNLL precision

Abstract

We present a calculation of higgsino and gaugino pair production at the LHC at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy, matched to approximate next-to-next-to-leading order (aNNLO) QCD corrections. We briefly review the formalism for the resummation of large threshold logarithms and highlight the analytical results required at aNNLO+NNLO accuracy. Our numerical results are found to depend on the mass and nature of the produced charginos and neutralinos. The differential and total cross sections for light higgsinos, which like sleptons are produced mostly at small x and in the s-channel, are found to be again moderately increased with respect to our previous results. The differential and total cross sections for gauginos are, however, not increased any more due to the fact that gauginos, like squarks, are now constrained by ATLAS and CMS to be heavier than about 1 TeV, so that also t- and u-channels play an important role. The valence quarks probed at large x then also induce substantially different cross sections for positively and negatively charged gauginos. The higgsino and gaugino cross sections are both further stabilized at aNNLO+NNLL with respect to the variation of renormalization and factorization scales. We also now take mixing in the squark sector into account and study the dependence of the total cross sections on the squark and gluino masses as well as the trilinear coupling controlling the mixing in particular in the sbottom sector.