Top production at the Tevatron/LHC and nonstandard, strongly interacting spin one particles

TL;DR

This paper investigates constraints on nonstandard spin-one particles like axigluons and colorons from top-antitop production data at the Tevatron and LHC, providing bounds on their masses and potential signals.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed analysis of $t ar t$ constraints on extended strong interaction gauge bosons, including their effects on asymmetries and top polarization.

Findings

Current Tevatron data exclude axigluons below 900 GeV.

Coloron masses below 800 GeV are ruled out at 2σ level.

Predicted signals at the LHC could distinguish these particles from the Standard Model.

Abstract

In this note, we consider possible constraints from $t \bar t$ production on the gauge bosons of theories with an extended strong interaction sector such as axigluons or flavour universal colorons. Such constraints are found to be competitive with those obtained from the dijet data. The current $t \bar t$ data from the Tevatron rule out axigluon masses ($m_A$) up to 900 GeV and 850 GeV at 2 $\sigma$ and 4 $\sigma$ levels respectively. For the case of flavour universal colorons the data rule out a mass ($m_C$) below 800 GeV (780 GeV) at the $2 (4) \sigma $ level and also the mass range between 900 GeV to 2.1 TeV at 2 $\sigma$ level, for $\cot \xi = 1$, where $\xi$ is the mixing angle. For $\cot \xi =2$ on the other hand, the excluded range is $m_C \lsim 950 (920)$ GeV and $m_C \gsim 1.02 (1.15 \lsim m_C \lsim 1.8)$ TeV at $2 \sigma$ ($4 \sigma $) level. We point out that for higher axigluon/coloron masses, even for the dijet channel, the limits on the coloron mass, for $\cot \xi = 1$, may be different than those for the axigluon. We also compute the expected forward-backward asymmetry for the case of the axigluons which would allow it to be discriminated against the SM as also the colorons. We further find that at the LHC, the signal should be visible in the $t \bar t$ invariant mass spectrum for a wide range of axigluon and coloron masses that are still allowed. We point out how top polarisation may be used to further discriminate the axigluon and coloron case from the SM as well as from each other.