Squark and gluino production at hadron colliders

We have determined the theoretical predictions for the cross sections of squark and gluino production at p (p) over bar and pp colliders (Tevatron and LHC) in next-to-leading order of supersymmetric QCD. By reducing the dependence on the renormalization/factorization scale considerably, the theoretically predicted values for the cross sections are much more stable if these higher-order corrections are implemented. If squarks and gluinos are discovered, this improved stability translates into a reduced error on the masses, as extracted experimentally from the size of the production cross sections. The cross sections increase significantly if the next-to-leading order corrections are included at a renormalization/factorization scale near the average mass of the produced massive particles, This rise results in improved lower bounds on squark and gluino masses. By contrast, the shape of the transverse-momentum and rapidity distributions remains nearly unchanged when the next-to-leading order corrections are included. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.