Scale dependence of squark and gluino production cross sections

We investigate the choice of the renormalization and factorization scales for the production of squarks and gluinos at the Fermilab Tevatron collider as a function of the produced sparticle masses. We determine a scale to be used in leading-order perturbative QCD calculations optimized such that the normalization of the next-to-leading order cross section is reproduced. Use of this optimal scale permits at least a partial implementation of next-to-leading order contributions in leading order Monte Carlo simulations. We provide next-to-leading order predictions of the production cross sections for pairs of supersymmetric particles at the hadronic center-of-mass energy 2 TeV. [S0556-2821(99)02707-1].