The search for mirror quarks at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to detect mirror quarks at the LHC, arising from a model that explains tiny neutrino masses via a low-scale seesaw mechanism with mirror symmetry.

Contribution

It introduces a model with mirror symmetry and light Higgs multiplets that allows mirror quarks to be within LHC reach, and analyzes their collider signatures.

Findings

Mirror quarks have masses in the 150-800 GeV range.

Signals from mirror quark pair production are observable at 13 TeV LHC.

Decays can produce displaced vertices with long decay lengths.

Abstract

Observation of non-zero neutrino masses at a scale $\sim 10^{-1} - 10^{-2}$ eV is a major problem in the otherwise highly successful Standard Model. The most elegant mechanism to explain such tiny neutrino masses is the seesaw mechanism with right handed neutrinos. However, the required seesaw scale is so high, $\sim 10^{14}$ GeV, it will not have any collider implications. Recently, an explicit model has been constructed to realize the seesaw mechanism with the right handed neutrinos at the electroweak scale. The model has a mirror symmetry having both the left and right lepton and quark doublets and singlets for the same $SU(2)_W $ gauge symmetry. Additional Higgs multiplets have been introduced to realize this scenario. It turns out that these extra Higgs fields also help to satisfy the precision electroweak tests, and other observables. Because the scale of the symmetry breaking is electroweak, both the mirror quark and mirror leptons have masses in the electroweak scale in the range $ \sim 150 - 800 $ GeV. The mirror quarks / leptons decay to ordinary quarks /leptons plus very light neutral scalars. In this work, we calculate the final state signals arising from the pair productions of these mirror quarks and their subsequent decays. We find that these signals are well observable over the Standard Model background for $13$ TeV LHC. Depending on the associated Yukawa couplings, these decays can also give rise displaced vertices with long decay length, very different from the usual displaced vertices associated with b decays.