SCALAR LEPTOQUARK PAIR PRODUCTION AT THE CERN LHC - SIGNAL AND BACKGROUNDS

We present the results of an analysis for the pair production of scala r leptoquarks at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with root s = 14 TeV and L = 10 fb(-1) which includes the dominant sources of Standard Model background associated to this process: <t(t)over bar>, ZZ, WZ a nd Zjj production. The <t(t)over bar> process provides the main sourc e of background. We consider leptoquarks introduced in the framework o f a superstring-inspired E-6 model. The leptoquark production is found to be dominant in all regions of parameter space for leptoquark masse s below 750 GeV. We establish the discovery reach of the leptoquarks a t 750 GeV (1 TeV) for a branching ratio of B(LQ --> eq) = 0.5 (B = 1).