Discovery Prospects of an Almost Fermiophobic W' in the Three-Site Higgsless Model at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to discover an almost fermiophobic W' boson predicted by the Three-Site Higgsless Model at the LHC, focusing on its production and detection prospects across various decay channels.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of W' discovery thresholds in the Three-Site Higgsless Model, including fast detector simulation and multiple final state channels.

Findings

W' masses of 380, 500, and 600 GeV can be probed at the LHC.

Discovery thresholds depend on the W' coupling to light fermions.

Multiple decay channels enhance detection prospects.

Abstract

In extensions of the Standard Model with compactified extra dimensions, perturbative unitarity of the longitudinal gauge bosons is maintained through the contribution of heavy KK excitations of the gauge fields, without the necessity of introducing a Higgs field. The Three-Site Higgsless Model represents a minimal approach in this respect, containing just one extra set of heavy gauge bosons Z'/W' in the spectrum. While the Z' can have robust couplings to SM fermions and hence may be detected within the first 1-20 1/fb of LHC data at 14 TeV, the coupling of the W' to light fermions is suppressed and depends on the model parameters. Expanding on previous parton level studies, we determine discovery thresholds of the W' in s-channel Drell-Yan production at the LHC for W' masses of 380, 500 and 600 GeV, combining analyses of the semileptonic final states lljj, lnjj and the leptonic final state lnll including fast detector simulation.