Transverse-momentum resummation for gaugino-pair production at hadron colliders

We present a first precision analysis of the transverse-momentum spectrum of gaugino pairs produced at the Tevatron and the LHC with center-of-mass energies of 1.96 and 10 or 14 TeV. respectively. Our calculation is based on a universal resummation formalism at next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, which is consistently matched to the perturbative prediction at O(alpha(s)). Numerical results are given for the gold-plated associated production of neutralinos and charginos decaying into three charged leptons with missing transverse energy as well as for the pair production of neutralinos and charginos at two typical benchmark points in the constrained MSSM. We show that the matched resummation results differ considerably from the Monte Carlo predictions employed traditionally in experimental analyses and discuss the impact on the determination of SUSY mass parameters from derived transverse-mass spectra. We also investigate in detail the theoretical uncertainties coming from scale and parton-density function variations and non-perturbative effects. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.