Leptoquarks decaying to a top quark and a charged lepton at hadron colliders

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to detect leptoquarks decaying to a top quark and a charged lepton at the Tevatron and LHC, focusing on different mass regimes and decay channels.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the sensitivity of Tevatron and LHC experiments to leptoquarks coupling to top quarks and charged leptons, including mass-dependent decay modes and existing constraints.

Findings

Tevatron could exclude leptoquarks with mass below 160 GeV.

LHC can detect leptoquarks with mass above top quark mass for certain decay channels.

Sensitivity depends on leptoquark mass and decay modes.

Abstract

We study the sensitivity of the Tevatron and the 7 TeV LHC to a leptoquark S coupling to a top quark and a charged lepton L (= e, mu, or tau). For the Tevatron, we focus on the case m_S < m_t, where the leptoquark pair production cross section is large, and the decay is three-body: S --> W b L^{\pm}. We argue that existing Tevatron observations could exclude m_S \lsim 160 GeV. For m_S > m_t, we show that the LHC experiments with low integrated luminosity could be sensitive to such leptoquarks decaying to tl^{\pm} with l= mu or tau.