Threshold resummation for slepton-pair production at hadron colliders

We present a first and extensive study of threshold resummation effects for supersymmetric (SUSY) particle production at hadron colliders, focusing on Drell-Yan like slepton-pair and slepton-sneutrino associated production. After confirming the known next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections and generalizing, the NLO SUSY-QCD corrections to the case of mixing squarks in the virtual loop contributions, we employ the usual Mellin N-space resummation formalism with the minimal prescription for the inverse Mellin-transform and improve it by resumming I/N-suppressed and a class of N-independent universal contributions. Numerically, our results increase the theoretical cross sections by 5 to 15% with respect to the NLO predictions and stabilize them by reducing the scale dependence from tip to 20% at NLO to less than 10% with threshold resummation. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.