Probing the Green-Schwarz Mechanism at the Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential for discovering new abelian gauge bosons with anomalous couplings at the LHC, focusing on their unique decay signatures and the implications for high-energy physics and string theory.

Contribution

It introduces a phenomenological study of anomalous $X$ bosons with Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation, analyzing their production and decay at the LHC for the first time.

Findings

Potential to detect $X$ bosons via $ZZ$ decay channel at the LHC

Production cross-section estimates for $X$ bosons from vector boson fusion

Implications for probing high-energy theories like string theory

Abstract

We investigate the phenomenology of new abelian gauge bosons, which we denote as $X$ bosons, that suffer a mixed anomaly with the Standard Model, but are made self-consistent by the Green-Schwarz mechanism. A distinguishing aspect of the resulting effective theory is the decay of $X$ bosons into Standard Model gauge bosons, $X\to ZZ, WW, \gamma Z$. We compute the production cross-section of the $X$ boson from vector boson fusion at the Large Hadron Collider. We study the $pp\to X\to ZZ\to 4l$ signal, and analyze the prospects of discovery. We argue that such a discovery could indirectly probe high energies, even up to the string scale.