Heavy Vector Triplets at a Muon Collider

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the potential of a future muon collider to detect heavy vector triplets, comparing its sensitivity to other colliders and including indirect electroweak precision constraints.

Contribution

It provides a detailed collider analysis of heavy vector triplet production and decay at a muon collider, highlighting its competitive reach compared to other future colliders.

Findings

Muon collider can probe heavy vectors up to ~12 TeV.

Sensitivity exceeds HE-LHC but not FCC-hh.

Includes indirect electroweak precision limits.

Abstract

Heavy spin-one particles are well-motivated new physics candidates that can have their origin in weakly coupled extensions of the Standard Model gauge group or in strongly coupled Composite Higgs models. Due to the variety of production and decay modes, heavy vector triplets are a useful benchmark for the study and comparison of future colliders. Here we perform a detailed collider analysis of a variety of $2 \to 2$ and $2 \to 3$ processes at a proposed future muon collider. We focus on decays into leptons and Standard Model gauge bosons, and find that heavy vector triplets could be probed up to masses of around $12\,$TeV for almost any (perturbative) value of the coupling. We compare the direct reach of a muon collider to the LHC and to updated projections for the HL-LHC, HE-LHC and FCC-hh, and include indirect limits from future measurements of electroweak precision observables. We find that a muon collider offers projected sensitivities that are competitive with future hadron colliders, exceeding those of the HE-LHC in the scenarios considered though not reaching the projected sensitivity of the FCC-hh.