Discovery potential for $T' \to tZ$ in the trilepton channel at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the LHC's ability to discover heavy top partners decaying into a top quark and a Z boson in the trilepton channel, demonstrating that simple analysis methods can effectively probe masses up to 2 TeV.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive study of the discovery potential for $T'$ in the trilepton channel, including a comparison of analysis techniques and reinterpretation in terms of anomalous couplings.

Findings

Trilepton channel effectively reduces background.

Simple cut-and-count analysis is as powerful as multivariate methods.

Potential to probe $T'$ masses up to 2 TeV.

Abstract

The LHC discovery potential of heavy top partners decaying into a top quark and a $Z$ boson is studied in the trilepton channel at 13 TeV in the single production mode. The clean multilepton final state allows to strongly reduce the background contaminations and to reconstruct the $T'$ mass. We show that a simple cut-and-count analysis probes the parameter space of a simplified model as efficiently as a dedicated multivariate analysis. The trilepton signature finally turns out to be able to probe $T'$ masses up to $2.0$ TeV, when mixing with first generation quarks is included. The reinterpretation in terms of the top-$Z$-quark anomalous coupling is shown.