Monotops at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential for detecting monotops, a novel signature involving single top quark production with missing energy, at the LHC, and assesses the experimental sensitivity to such processes.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified model for monotop production mechanisms and evaluates LHC sensitivity using hadronic top decay channels.

Findings

Constraints can be set with 1 fb^{-1} at 7 TeV

Monotops can arise from baryon number violating or flavor changing neutral interactions

Multiple production modes are possible for monotops

Abstract

We explore scenarios where top quarks may be produced singly in association with missing energy, a very distinctive signature, which in analogy with monojets, we dub monotops. We find that monotops can be produced in a variety of modes, typically characterized by baryon number violating or flavor changing neutral interactions. We build a simplified model that encompasses all the possible (tree-level) production mechanisms and study the LHC sensitiveness to a few representative scenarios by considering fully hadronic top decays. We find that constraints on such exotic models can already be set with one inverse femtobarn of integrated luminosity collected at seven TeV.