Associated production of Z boson and a pair of new quarks at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the production of Z bosons with new heavy quarks at the LHC, analyzing cross sections for different quark types and exploring detection prospects of multi-lepton signals.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed calculations of cross sections for both sequential and vector-like quarks in associated Z boson production at the LHC.

Findings

Sequential fermions can produce cross sections up to 100 fb for heavy quark masses.

Vector-like quark production is suppressed by mixing parameters.

Multi-lepton signals from $b'$ decays are rare but potentially detectable with high luminosity.

Abstract

The associated production of $Z$ boson and a pair of new quarks at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is studied. The cross sections for both sequential fermions and vector-like fermions are presented. It is found that for sequential fermions the cross sections can reach $1\sim 10^2$ fb for heavy quark mass $m_Q$ from 1000 GeV to 200 GeV. For vector-like quarks, the cross sections are suppressed by mixing parameter $\sin\theta_L$. Focusing on process $pp \to b'b'$, we investigate the possibility of detecting the $6l+2j$ signal. For a $b'$ with light mass and a large branching ratio of $b'\to bZ$, it is found that only several signal events (parton level) can be produced with 1000 fb$^{-1}$ integrated luminosity. Although the signal events are rare, all the final states are produced centrally and multi lepton final states are clear at hadron collider, which could be easily detected.