Renormalizable quartic couplings among new particles are typical of
supersymmetric models. Their detection could provide a test for supersymmetry,
discriminating it from other extensions of the Standard Model. Quartic
couplings among squarks and sleptons, together with the SU(3) gauge couplings
for squarks, allow a new realization of the gluon-fusion mechanism for
pair-production of sleptons at the one-loop level. The corresponding production
cross section, however, is at most of O(1)fb for slepton and squark
masses of O(100)GeV. We then extend our investigation to the
gluon-fusion production of sleptons through the exchange of Higgs bosons. The
cross section is even smaller, of O(0.1)fb, if the exchanged Higgs
boson is considerably below the slepton-pair threshold, but it is enhanced when
it is resonant. It can reach O(10)fb for the production of sleptons
of same-chirality, exceeding these values for τ's of
opposite-chirality, even when chirality-mixing terms in the squark sector are
vanishing. The cross section can be further enhanced if these mixing terms are
nonnegligible, providing a potentially interesting probe of the Higgs sector,
in particular of parameters such as A, μ, and tanβ.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figure