QCD Corrections and the Leptoquark Interpretation of the HERA High Q^2 Events

The excess of high-$Q^2$ events found by H1 and ZEUS at HERA in $e^+p$ deep-inelastic scattering above the Standard Model prediction motivates us to calculate the NLO QCD corrections to the HERA scalar leptoquark (or squark) production cross sections. We find that the corrections are significant, of order 50% in the mass range of interest. We also calculate the leptoquark average transverse momentum squared and find it to be rather small. Various leptoquark production cross sections at the Tevatron $p \bar p$ collider are also considered. We investigate in detail the leptoquark interpretation of the HERA data. First we assume a minimal leptoquark model with a single diagonal Yukawa coupling to first family lepton and quark mass eigenstates only. In this case constraints from atomic parity violating experiments allow only isodoublet scalar leptoquark production at HERA. This interpretation can be confirmed or ruled out in the near future by high luminosity data at the Tevatron. The Tevatron data already appear to rule out the vector leptoquark interpretation of the HERA data. We also consider a more general model which allows for all possible left-handed, right-handed, flavour and lepton number changing couplings. The allowed values of the Yukawa couplings of this general model offer several different interpretations of the data which are radically different from the minimal model solutions. However these somewhat ad hoc tuned solutions can easily be tested by future HERA experiments.