Detecting Fourth Generation Quarks at Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

This paper explores how fourth-generation heavy quarks could be detected at the LHC through specific decay channels, using kinematic analysis to determine their mass and identify signals above Standard Model backgrounds.

Contribution

It introduces a method to identify and measure the mass of fourth-generation quarks at the LHC by analyzing decay kinematics, even with under-determined systems.

Findings

Fourth-generation quarks with 400-600 GeV mass can produce detectable signals.

Same sign dilepton channels have minimal background, aiding discovery.

Kinematic techniques can estimate quark masses despite incomplete data.

Abstract

We consider the phenomenology of the fourth generation heavy quarks which would be pair produced at the LHC. We show that if such a quark with a mass in the phenomenologically interesting range of 400 GeV--600 GeV decays to a light quark and a W-boson, it will produce a signal in a number of channels which can be seen above the background from the three generation Standard Model processes. In particular, such quarks could be seen in channels where multiple jets are present with large missing momentum and either a single hard lepton, an opposite sign hard lepton pair or a same sign lepton pair. In the same sign dilepton channel there is little background and so an excess of such pairs at large invariant mass will indicate the presence of heavy down type quarks. More generally, in our study, the main tool we use to determine the mass of the heavy quark in each of the channels we consider is to use the kinematics of the decay of such quarks to resolve the momenta of the unobserved neutrinos. We show how this can be carried out, even in cases where the kinematics is under-determined by use of the approximation, which holds quite well, that the two heavy quarks are nearly at rest in the center of mass frame. Since it is very likely that at least the lightest heavy quark decays in the mode we consider, this means that it should be observed at the LHC. Indeed, it is expected that the mass splitting between the quarks is less than $m_W$ so that if the Cabbibo-Kobayshi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix element between the fourth and lower generations are not too small, both members of the fourth generation quark doublet will decay in this way. If this is so, the combined signal of these two quarks will make the signal for the fourth generation somewhat more prominent.