SLEPTON PRODUCTION AS A PROBE OF THE SQUARK MASS SCALE

We investigate an important radiative correction to the slepton and ch argino production processes. We consider a supersymmetric spectrum wit h a large splitting between the squark and slepton masses. In this cas e, in the effective theory below the squark mass threshold, the supers ymmetric Slavnov-Taylor identities which enforce the equality of the g auge and gaugino couplings are violated. The gaugino propagators recei ve potentially large corrections due to virtual quark or squark loop e ffects. We compute the full one-loop (s)quark corrected slepton produc tion cross sections. The t-channel one-loop scattering amplitudes are factorized into an effective chargino-neutralino mass matrix and an ef fective fermion-sfermion-gaugino coupling. The difference between the effective gaugino coupling and the gauge coupling is proportional to l n(M-Q(-)/m(rho)(similar to)) in the large squark mass limit. We find t hat the one-loop corrected slepton production cross sections can depen d on the squark mass strongly, up to 9% X log(10)(M-Q(similar to)/m(rh o)(-)). We investigate the squark mass sensitivity of the slepton cros s-section measurements at a future linear collider. For sneutrino prod uction accessible at root s = 500 GeV there can be sensitivity to squa rk masses at or larger than 1 TeV.