A generalisation of the narrow-width approximation (NWA) is formulated which allows for a consistent treatment of interference effects between nearly mass-degenerate particles in the factorisation of a more complicated process into production and decay parts. It is demonstrated that interference effects of this kind arising in BSM models can be very large, leading to drastic modifications of predictions based on the standard NWA. The application of the generalised NWA is demonstrated both at tree level and at one-loop order for an example process where the neutral Higgs bosons h and H of the MSSM are produced in the decay of a heavy neutralino and subsequently decay into a fermion pair. The generalised NWA, based on on-shell matrix elements or their approximations leading to simple weight factors, is shown to produce UV- and IR-finite results which are numerically close to the result of the full process at tree level and at one-loop order, where an agreement of better than 1% is found for the considered process. The most accurate prediction for this process based on the generalised NWA, taking into account also corrections that are formally of higher orders, is briefly discussed.

Germany

Elina Fuchs

Silja Thewes

Georg Weiglein

Interference effects in BSM processes with a generalised narrow-width approximation

We perform the resummation of soft-gluon emissions for squark and gluino production at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy. We include also the one-loop hard matching coefficients as well as Coulomb corrections to second order, using Mellin-moment methods. We study the characteristics of this resummation in detail for a centre-of-mass (CM) energy of 8 TeV at the LHC, and for squark and gluino masses up to 2.5 TeV. We find significant enhancing effects for all four processes of squark- and gluinopair production. Scale dependence is generally reduced compared to NLL resummation, except for gluino-pair production where we find a moderate enhancement.