Leptonic signatures of color-sextet scalars

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential to detect color-sextet scalars at the LHC through their unique leptonic signatures, focusing on single production with a lepton and jets, and proposes optimized search strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel search method for color-sextet scalars involving leptonic final states, enhancing sensitivity over existing leptoquark searches.

Findings

Projected discovery reach during next LHC runs

Higher sensitivity compared to existing leptoquark searches

Identification of distinctive kinematic features of leptonic sextet events

Abstract

Color-sextet scalars could have an array of possible couplings to the Standard Model beyond their well known renormalizable couplings to quark pairs. The next-largest couplings these scalars might enjoy have mass dimension six, and some include electroweak fields and can therefore produce highly distinctive signals at hadron colliders. Here we study the single production of color-sextet scalars in association with a hard lepton, which results from a dimension-six coupling to leptons in addition to quarks and gluons. We identify parameter space in which these scalars decay promptly and propose a search for such particles in final states with two jets and an opposite-charge lepton pair, one member of which has high momentum. We then impose our selection criteria on the proposed signal and its leading backgrounds to project the discovery potential and exclusion limits during the next runs of the LHC. We compare our search with existing searches for leptoquarks, and we find we achieve much higher sensitivity with our tailored approach due to the unique kinematics of leptonic sextet events.