Single production of vector-like bottom quark at the LHeC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to detect vector-like bottom quarks at the LHeC, analyzing their production, decay signatures, and significance, with a focus on the semileptonic channel for improved detection prospects.

Contribution

It provides a model-independent analysis of single VLQ-$B$ production and decay at the LHeC, including simulation of signals and backgrounds to evaluate detection significance.

Findings

Semileptonic channel offers better detection prospects than other channels.

Detection significance depends on the VLQ-$B$ mass and collider parameters.

Fast simulation confirms the feasibility of observing VLQ-$B$ at the LHeC.

Abstract

Existences of vector-like quarks (VLQs) are predicted in many new physics scenarios beyond the Standard Model (SM). We study the possibility of detecting the vector-like bottom quark (VLQ-$B$) being the $SU(2)$ singlet with electric charge $-1/3$ at the Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) in a model-independent framework. The decay properties and single production of VLQ-$B$ at the LHeC are explored. Three types of signatures are investigated. By carrying out a fast simulation for the signals and the corresponding backgrounds, the signal significances are obtained. Our numerical results show that detecting of VLQ-$B$ via the semileptonic channel is better than via the fully hadronic or leptonic channel.