Leptoquark Processes
Leptoquarks arise in many scenarios, and can have widely different
characteristics, with respect to spin, isospin am d flavour.
The current implementation in no sense attempts to exhaust these
possibilities, but only to encode one of the simplest possibilities,
with a single scalar leptoquark, denoted LQ and assigned PDG
code 42. The leptoquark is assumed to carry specific quark
and lepton quantum numbers, by default u quark plus electron.
These flavour numbers are conserved, i.e. a process such as
u e^- → LQ → d nu_e is not allowed.
Although only one leptoquark is implemented, its flavours may be
changed arbitrarily to study the different possibilities. The
flavours of the leptoquark are defined by the quark and lepton
flavours in the decay mode list. Therefore, to change from the
current u e^- to c mu^+, say, you only need
a line
pythia.readString("42:0:products = 4 -13");
in your main program, or the equivalent in a command file.
The former must always be a quark, while the latter could be a lepton
or an antilepton; a charge-conjugate partner is automatically defined
by the program. At initialization, the charge is recalculated as a
function of the flavours defined; also the leptoquark name is redefined
to be of the type LQ_q,l, where actual quark and lepton
flavours are displayed.
The leptoquark is likely to be fairly long-lived, in which case it
could have time to fragment into a mesonic- or baryonic-type state, which
would decay later on. Currently this possibility is not handled; therefore
the leptoquark is always assumed to decay before fragmentation.
For that reason the leptoquark can also not be put stable.
Production processes
Four production processes have been implemented, which normally would
not overlap and therefore could be run together.
flag LeptoQuark:all
(default = off)
Common switch for the group of lowest-order LQ production
processes, i.e. the four ones below.
flag LeptoQuark:ql2LQ
(default = off)
Scatterings q l → LQ.
Code 3201.
flag LeptoQuark:qg2LQl
(default = off)
Scatterings q g → LQ l.
Code 3202.
flag LeptoQuark:gg2LQLQbar
(default = off)
Scatterings g g → LQ LQbar.
Code 3203.
flag LeptoQuark:qqbar2LQLQbar
(default = off)
Scatterings q qbar → LQ LQbar.
Code 3204.
Parameters
In the above scenario the main free parameters are the leptoquark flavour
content, set as already described, and the LQ mass, set as usual.
In addition there is one further parameter.
parm LeptoQuark:kCoup
(default = 1.0; minimum = 0.0)
multiplicative factor in the LQ → q l squared Yukawa coupling,
and thereby in the LQ width and the q l → LQ and
other cross sections. Specifically, lambda^2/(4 pi) = k alpha_em,
i.e. it corresponds to the $k$ factor of [Hew88].