Squark pair production in the MSSM with explicit CP violation

Abstract

We analyze effects of the CP-odd soft phases in the MSSM on the pair productions of colored superpartners in pp collisions at the LHC energies. We find that, among all pair-production processes, those of the scalar quarks in the first and second generations are particularly sensitive to the CP-odd phases, more precisely, to the phases of the gluinos and neutralinos. We compute pair-production cross sections, classify various production modes according to their dependencies on the gluino and neutralino phases, perform a detailed numerical analysis to determine individual as well as total cross sections, and give a detailed discussion of 2. electric dipole moment (EDM) bounds. We find that pair productions of first and second generation squarks serve as a viable probe of the CP violation sources in the gaugino sector of the theory even if experiments cannot determine chirality, flavor and electric charge of the squarks produced.