Determination of the Spin of New Resonances in Electroweak Gauge Boson Pair Production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how to determine the spin of new electroweak resonances at the LHC using leptonic decay channels, demonstrating that spin can be identified with high confidence through lepton correlation analysis.

Contribution

It provides a model-independent method to determine the spin of new vector resonances at the LHC without event reconstruction in the center-of-mass frame.

Findings

Spin can be determined with 99% CL in many scenarios.

Lepton correlation analysis is highly effective for spin determination.

Method works with 100 fb^{-1} of data.

Abstract

The appearance of spin-1 resonances associated to the electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) sector is expected in many extensions of the Standard Model. We analyze the CERN Large Hadron Collider potential to probe the spin of possible new charged and neutral vector resonances through the purely leptonic processes pp --> Z^\prime --> l^+ l^{\prime -} Emiss_T, and pp --> W^\prime --> l^{\prime \pm} l^+ l^- Emiss_T, with l, l^\prime = e or \mu. We perform a model independent analysis and demonstrate that the spin of the new states can be determined with 99% CL in a large fraction of the parameter space where these resonances can be observed with 100 fb^{-1}. We show that the best sensitivity to the spin is obtained by directly studying correlations between the final state leptons, without the need of reconstructing the events in their center-of-mass frames.