Scalar Leptoquark Pair Production at the CERN LHC: Signal and Backgrounds

We present the results of an analysis for the pair production of scalar leptoquarks at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with energy=14 TeV and luminosity=10 fb^{-1} which includes the dominant sources of Standard Model background associated to this process: top-antitop, ZZ, WZ and Z*jj production. The top-antitop process provides the main source of background. We consider leptoquarks introduced in the framework of a superstring-inspired E_6 model. The leptoquark production is found to be dominant in all regions of parameter space for leptoquark masses below 750 GeV. We establish the discovery reach of the leptoquarks at 750 GeV (1 TeV) for a branching ratio of B(LQ -> eq)=0.5 (B=1).