Boosted Event Topologies from TeV Scale Light Quark Composite Partners

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new search strategy for detecting TeV-scale light quark partners decaying into boosted Higgs bosons and light quarks, demonstrating potential for discovery at the LHC.

Contribution

It proposes a novel boosted Higgs tagging technique combined with kinematic and b-tagging methods for efficient detection of pair-produced quark partners.

Findings

Achieves S/B > 1 at 14 TeV LHC with 35 fb^{-1}

Signal significance of ~7σ for the proposed search

Method applicable to future vector-like quark searches

Abstract

We propose a new search strategy for quark partners which decay into a boosted Higgs and a light quark. As an example, we consider phenomenologically viable right handed up-type quark partners of mass $\sim 1$ TeV in composite pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone-boson Higgs models within the context of flavorful naturalness. Our results show that $S/B > 1$ and signal significance of $\sim 7\sigma$ is achievable at $\sqrt{s} = 14$ TeV LHC with 35 $fb^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity, sufficient to claim discovery of a new particle. A combination of a multi-dimensional boosted Higgs tagging technique, kinematics of pair produced heavy objects and $b$-tagging serves to efficiently diminish the large QCD backgrounds while maintaining adequate levels of signal efficiency. We present the analysis in the context of effective field theory, such that our results can be applied to any future search for pair produced vector-like quarks with decay modes to Higgs and a light jet.