No Arabic abstract
The LHC search strategies for leptoquarks that couple dominantly to a top quark are different than for the ones that couple mostly to the light quarks. We consider charge $1/3$ ($phi_1$) and $5/3$ ($phi_5$) scalar leptoquarks that can decay to a top quark and a charged lepton ($tell$) giving rise to a resonance system of a boosted top and a high-$p_{rm T}$ lepton. We introduce simple phenomenological models suitable for bottom-up studies and explicitly map them to all possible scalar leptoquark models within the Buchm{u}ller-R{u}ckl-Wyler classifications that can have the desired decays. We study pair and single productions of these leptoquarks. Contrary to the common perception, we find that the single production of top-philic leptoquarks $phi = {phi_1,phi_5}$ in association with a lepton and jets could be significant for order one $phi tell$ coupling in certain scenarios. We propose a strategy of selecting events with at least one hadronic-top and two high-$p_{rm T}$ same flavour opposite sign leptons. This captures events from both pair and single productions. Our strategy can significantly enhance the LHC discovery potential especially in the high-mass region where single productions become more prominent. Our estimation shows that a scalar leptoquark as heavy as $sim1.7$ TeV can be discovered at the $14$ TeV LHC with 3 ab$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity in the $tellell+X$ channel for $100%$ branching ratio in the $phito tell $ decay mode. However, in some scenarios, the discovery reach can increase beyond $2$ TeV even though the branching ratio comes down to about $50%$.
We show that stringent limits on leptoquarks that couple to first-generation quarks and left-handed electrons or muons can be derived from the spectral shape of the charged-current Drell-Yan process ($p p to ell^pm u$) at Run 2 of the LHC. We identify and examine all six leptoquark species that can generate such a monolepton signal, including both scalar and vector leptoquarks, and find cases where the leptoquark exchange interferes constructively, destructively or not at all with the Standard Model signal. When combined with the corresponding leptoquark-mediated neutral-current ($p p to ell^+ ell^-$) process, we find the most stringent limits obtained to date, outperforming bounds from pair production and atomic parity violation. We show that, with 3000 fb$^{-1}$ of data, combined measurements of the transverse mass in $p p to ell^pm u$ events and invariant mass in $p p to ell^+ ell^-$ events can probe masses between 8 TeV and 18 TeV, depending on the species of leptoquark, for electroweak-sized couplings. In light of such robust sensitivities, we strongly encourage the LHC experiments to interpret Drell-Yan (dilepton and monolepton) events in terms of leptoquarks, alongside usual scenarios like $Z$ bosons and contact interactions.
We study jet substructures of a boosted polarized top quark, which undergoes the hadronic decay $tto b ubar d$, in the perturbative QCD framework, focusing on the energy profile and the differential energy profile. These substructures are factorized into the convolution of a hard top-quark decay kernel with a bottom-quark jet function and a $W$-boson jet function, where the latter is further factorized into the convolution of a hard $W$-boson decay kernel with two light-quark jet functions. Computing the hard kernels to leading order in QCD and including the resummation effect in the jet functions, we show that the differential jet energy profile is a useful observable for differentiating the helicity of a boosted hadronic top quark: a right-handed top jet exhibits quick descent of the differential energy profile with the inner test cone radius $r$, which is attributed to the $mbox{V-A}$ structure of weak interaction and the dead-cone effect associated with the $W$-boson jet. The above helicity differentiation may help to reveal the chiral structure of physics beyond the Standard Model at high energies.
Leptoquarks (LQs) have attracted increasing attention within recent years, mainly since they can explain the flavor anomalies found in $R(D^{(*)})$, $b rightarrow s ell^+ ell^-$ transitions and the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. In this article, we lay the groundwork for further automated analyses by presenting the complete Lagrangian and the corresponding set of Feynman rules for scalar leptoquarks. This means we consider the five representations $Phi_1, Phi_{tilde1}, Phi_2, Phi_{tilde2}$ and $Phi_3$ and include the triple and quartic self-interactions, as well as couplings to the Standard Model (SM) fermions, gauge bosons and the Higgs. The calculations are performed using FeynRules and all model files are publicly available online at https://gitlab.com/lucschnell/SLQrules.
We examine new aspects of leptoquark (LQ) phenomenology using effective field theory (EFT). We construct a complete set of leading effective operators involving SU(2) singlets scalar LQ and the SM fields up to dimension six. We show that, while the renormalizable LQ-lepton-quark interaction Lagrangian can address the persistent hints for physics beyond the Standard Model in the B-decays $bar B to D^{(*)} tau bar u$, $bar B to bar K ell^+ ell^-$ and in the measured anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, the LQ higher dimensional effective operators may lead to new interesting effects associated with lepton number violation. These include the generation of one-loop sub-eV Majorana neutrino masses, mediation of neutrinoless double-$beta$ decay and novel LQ collider signals. For the latter, we focus on 3rd generation LQ ($phi_3$) in a framework with an approximate $Z_3$ generation symmetry, and show that one class of the dimension five LQ operators may give rise to a striking asymmetric same-charge $phi_3 phi_3$ pair-production signal, which leads to low background same-sign leptons signals at the LHC. For example, with $M_{phi_3} sim 1$ TeV and a new physics scale of $Lambda sim 5$ TeV, we expect about $5000$ positively charged $tau^+ tau^+$ events via $pp to phi_3 phi_3 to tau^+ tau^+ + 2 cdot j_b$ ($j_b$=b-jet) at the 13 TeV LHC with an integrated luminosity of 300 fb$^{-1}$. It is interesting to note that, in the LQ EFT framework, the expected same-sign lepton signals have a rate which is several times larger than the QCD LQ-mediated opposite-sign leptons signals, $gg,q bar q to phi_3 phi_3^* to ell^+ ell^- +X$. We also consider the same-sign charged lepton signals in the LQ EFT framework at higher energy hadron colliders such as a 27 TeV HE-LHC and a 100 TeV FCC-hh.
We explore the sensitivity of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) near detector and the proposed DUNE-PRISM movable near detector to sub-GeV dark matter, specifically scalar dark matter coupled to the Standard Model via a sub-GeV dark photon. We consider dark matter produced in the DUNE target that travels to the detector and scatters off electrons. By combining searches for dark matter at many off-axis positions with DUNE-PRISM, sensitivity to this scenario can be much stronger than when performing a measurement at one on-axis position.