No Arabic abstract
Leptoquarks have recently received much attention especially because they may provide an explanation to the $R_{D^{(*)}}$ and $R_{K^{(*)}}$ anomalies in rare $B$ meson decays. In a previous paper we proposed a systematic search strategy for all possible leptoquark flavors by focusing on leptoquark pair production. In this paper, we extend this strategy to large (order unity) leptoquark couplings which offer new search opportunities: single leptoquark production and $t$-channel leptoquark exchange with dilepton final states. We discuss the unique features of the different search channels and show that they cover complementary regions of parameter space. We collect and update all currently available bounds for the different flavor final states from LHC searches and from atomic parity violation measurements. As an application of our analysis, we find that current limits do not exclude the leptoquark explanation of the $B$ physics anomalies but that the high luminosity run of the LHC will reach the most interesting parameter space.
Leptoquarks occur in many new physics scenarios and could be the next big discovery at the LHC. The purpose of this paper is to point out that a model-independent search strategy covering all possible leptoquarks is possible and has not yet been fully exploited. To be systematic we organize the possible leptoquark final states according to a leptoquark matrix with entries corresponding to nine experimentally distinguishable leptoquark decays: any of {light-jet, b-jet, top} with any of {neutrino, $e/mu$, $tau$}. The 9 possibilities can be explored in a largely model-independent fashion with pair-production of leptoquarks at the LHC. We review the status of experimental searches for the 9 components of the leptoquark matrix, pointing out which 3 have not been adequately covered. We plead that experimenters publish bounds on leptoquark cross sections as functions of mass for as wide a range of leptoquark masses as possible. Such bounds are essential for reliable recasts to general leptoquark models. To demonstrate the utility of the leptoquark matrix approach we collect and summarize searches with the same final states as leptoquark pair production and use them to derive bounds on a complete set of Minimal Leptoquark models which span all possible flavor and gauge representations for scalar and vector leptoquarks.
In supersymmetric models with radiatively-driven naturalness and light higgsinos, the top squarks may lie in the 0.5- 3TeV range and thus only a fraction of natural parameter space is accessible to LHC searches. We outline the range of top squark and lightest SUSY particle masses preferred by electroweak naturalness in the standard parameter space plane. We note that the branching fraction for b-> sgamma decay favors top squarks much heavier than 500 GeV. Such a range of top-squark mass values is in contrast to previous expectations where m(stop)<500 GeV had been considered natural. In radiative natural SUSY, top squarks decay roughly equally via t1-> bW1 and Z_{1,2} where W1 and Z_{1,2} are higgsino-like electroweak-inos. Thus, top squark pair production should yield all of tbar{t}+eslt, tbar{b}+eslt, bbar{t}+eslt and bbar{b}+eslt signatures at comparable rates. We propose that future LHC top squark searches take place within a semi-simplified model which corresponds more closely to expectations from theory.
We provide a systematic effective lagrangian description of the phenomenology of the lightest top-partners in composite Higgs models. Our construction is based on symmetry, on selection rules and on plausible dynamical assumptions. The structure of the resulting simplified models depends on the quantum numbers of the lightest top partner and of the operators involved in the generation of the top Yukawa. In all cases the phenomenology is conveniently described by a small number of parameters, and the results of experimental searches are readily interpreted as a test of naturalness. We recast presently available experimental bounds on heavy fermions into bounds on top partners: LHC has already stepped well inside the natural region of parameter space.
We lay out a comprehensive physics case for a future high-energy muon collider, exploring a range of collision energies (from 1 to 100 TeV) and luminosities. We highlight the advantages of such a collider over proposed alternatives. We show how one can leverage both the point-like nature of the muons themselves as well as the cloud of electroweak radiation that surrounds the beam to blur the dichotomy between energy and precision in the search for new physics. The physics case is buttressed by a range of studies with applications to electroweak symmetry breaking, dark matter, and the naturalness of the weak scale. Furthermore, we make sharp connections with complementary experiments that are probing new physics effects using electric dipole moments, flavor violation, and gravitational waves. An extensive appendix provides cross section predictions as a function of the center-of-mass energy for many canonical simplified models.
We analyze the implications of CP-violating scalar leptoquark (LQ) interactions for experimental probes of parity- and time-reversal violating properties of polar molecules. These systems are predominantly sensitive to the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron and nuclear-spin-independent (NSID) electron-nucleon interaction. The LQ model can generate both a tree-level NSID interaction as well as the electron EDM at one-loop order. Including both interactions, we find that the NSID interaction can dominate the molecular response. For moderate values of couplings, the current experimental results give roughly two orders of magnitude stronger limits on the electron EDM than one would otherwise infer from a sole-source analysis.