Supersymmetric QCD corrections to the W-boson width

Abstract

We calculate the one-loop supersymmetric QCD corrections to the width of the $W$-boson. We find that these are of order $\sim \frac{{\alpha }_s}{\pi }\frac{1}{20}\frac{M_W^2}{M_S^2}{\Gamma }_{u\bar{d}}$, where $M_S$ is the supersymmetry breaking scale and ${\Gamma }_{u\bar{d}}$ the tree level hadronic width for $W^{+}\to u\bar{d}$. Due to the appearance of the suppression factor $\sim \frac{1}{20}$ these are at least two orders of magnitude smaller than the standard QCD corrections $\sim \frac{{\alpha }_s}{\pi }{\Gamma }_{u\bar{d}}$ and hence of the order of the two-loop electroweak effects. Therefore supersymmetric QCD corrections will only be of relevance once experiments reach that level of accuracy.

Comments: 7 pages, LaTeX file with 2 figures, uses epsf macros