Supersymmetric virtual effects in heavy quark pair production at LHC

Abstract

We consider the production of heavy ($b,t$) quark pairs at proton colliders in the theoretical framework of the MSSM. Under the assumption of a "moderately" light SUSY scenario, we first compute the leading logarithmic MSSM contributions at one loop for the elementary processes of production from a quark and from a gluon pair in the 1 TeV c.m. energy region. We show that in the initial gluon pair case (dominant in the chosen situation at LHC energies) the electroweak and the strong SUSY contributions concur to produce an enhanced effect whose relative value in the cross sections could reach the twenty percent size for large $\tan\beta$ values in the realistic proton-proton LHC process.Comment: 19 pages and 8 figures; version to appear in Phys. Rev.