A Quirky Probe of Neutral Naturalness

TL;DR

This paper explores how top partner pair production signals at the LHC can serve as a key probe for Neutral Naturalness theories, highlighting unique signatures like displaced decays and high-multiplicity events.

Contribution

It introduces the idea that top partner pair production signals are the primary and potentially exclusive way to detect Neutral Naturalness scenarios with quirky bound states at the LHC.

Findings

Top partner pair production yields distinctive LHC signatures.

Signals include displaced decays and high-multiplicity final states.

These signatures can be used to measure top partner properties and test the theory.

Abstract

We consider the signals arising from top partner pair production at the LHC as a probe of theories of Neutral Naturalness. We focus on scenarios in which top partners carry electroweak charges, such as Folded SUSY or the Quirky Little Higgs. In this class of theories the top partners are pair produced as quirky bound states, since they are charged under a mirror color group whose lightest states are hidden glueballs. The quirks promptly de-excite and annihilate into glueballs, which decay back to SM fermions via Higgs mixing. This can give rise to spectacular signatures at the LHC, such displaced decays, or high-multiplicity prompt production of many hard $\bar b b$ or $\tau^+ \tau^-$ pairs. We show that signals arising from top partner pair production constitute the primary discovery channel for this class of theories in most regions of parameter space, and might provide the only experimental probe of scenarios with sub-cm glueball decay lengths. The measurement of top partner masses and couplings, which could be used to test the neutral naturalness mechanism directly, is also a tantalizing possibility.