Direct stau production at the LHC

We investigate the direct production of supersymmetric scalar taus at the LHC. We present the general calculation of the dominant cross section contributions for hadronic stau pair production within the MSSM, taking into account left-right mixing of the stau eigenstates. We find that b-quark annihilation and gluon fusion can enhance the cross sections by more than one order of magnitude with respect to the Drell-Yan predictions. For long-lived staus, we consider CMSSM parameter regions with such enhanced cross sections and possible consequences from recent searches. We find that regions of exceptionally small stau yields, favoured by cosmology, are in tension with a recent CMS limit on m_stau.