Flavorful leptoquarks at hadron colliders

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential signatures and discovery prospects of leptoquarks at hadron colliders, emphasizing their decay patterns, flavor violation signals, and the need for future high-energy colliders with advanced detection capabilities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of leptoquark production and decay channels, including flavor violation effects, and assesses their detectability at current and future colliders.

Findings

Leptoquarks can have masses of a few TeV and decay mainly to third-generation quarks.

Signatures include $pp o b \mu \mu$ and $pp o b b \mu \mu$ processes.

Future colliders beyond the LHC are needed to explore the full phase space.

Abstract

$B$-physics data and flavor symmetries suggest that leptoquarks can have masses as low as few ${\cal{O}}(\mbox{TeV})$, predominantly decay to third generation quarks, and highlight $pp \to b \mu \mu$ signatures from single production and $pp \to b b \mu \mu$ from pair production. Abandoning flavor symmetries could allow for inverted quark hierarchies, and cause sizable $pp \to j \mu \mu$ and $jj \mu \mu $ cross sections, induced by second generation couplings. Final states with leptons other than muons including lepton flavor violation (LFV) ones can also arise. The corresponding couplings can also be probed by precision studies of the $B \to (X_s, K^*,\phi) ee $ distribution and LFV searches in $B$-decays. We demonstrate sensitivity in single leptoquark production for the LHC and extrapolate to the high luminosity HL-LHC. Exploration of the bulk of the phase space requires a hadron collider beyond the reach of the LHC, with $b$-identification capabilities.