Pair Production of Scalar Leptoquarks at the LHC to NLO Parton Shower Accuracy

Abstract: We present the scalar leptoquark pair production process at the LHC computed at the next-to-leading order in QCD, matched to the PYTHIA parton shower using the MC@NLO formalism. We consider the leading order decay of a leptoquark to a lepton ($e,\mu,\tau$ or $\nu_e,\nu_\mu,\nu_\tau$) and a jet and observe the effects of parton shower on the final states. For demonstration, we display the kinametical distributions of a selection of observables along with their scale uncertainties for the 13 TeV LHC. We also present pair production cross sections and $K$-factors using massless five-quark flavor scheme for different LHC center-of-mass energies. The complete stand-alone code is available online.