Top quark three-body decays in the R-parity violating MSSM

TL;DR

This paper investigates exotic three-body decays of the top quark caused by R-parity violating interactions in the MSSM, highlighting potential observability at the LHC due to sizable branching ratios.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of R-violating three-body top quark decays, including both tree-level and loop-induced processes, and assesses their experimental detectability.

Findings

Branching ratios can be sizable and within current collider sensitivities.

Some decay modes are already constrained by Tevatron data.

Decays could be observed at the LHC with improved sensitivity.

Abstract

In the minimal supersymmetric standard model the R-parity violating interactions can trigger various exotic three-body decays for the top quark, which may be accessible at the LHC. In this work we examine the R-violating decays t-> c X_1 X_2, which include the tree-level processes t-> c l^-_i l^+_j (l_i=e, mu, tau) and t->c d_i \bar{d}_j (d_i=d, s, b), as well as the loop induced processes t->c g X (X=g, \gamma, Z, h). We find that the hereto weakly constrained R-violating couplings can render the decay branching ratios quite sizable, some of which already reach the sensitivity of the Tevatron collider and can be expored at the LHC with better sensitivity.