Single Top Production as a Probe of Heavy Resonances

The single top quark final state provides sensitivity to new heavy resonances produced in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Particularly, the single top plus quark final state appears in models with heavy charged bosons or scalars, or in models with flavor-changing neutral currents involving the top quark. The cross sections and final state kinematics distinguish such models from each other and from standard model backgrounds. Several models of resonances decaying to a single top quark final state are presented and their phenomenology is discussed.

Searches for resonances in the tb and tc final states at the high-luminosity LHC

We study resonances decaying to one top quark and one additional quark (b or c) at the low- luminosity and high-luminosity 14 TeV LHC and at a future 33 TeV hadron collider in the context of Snowmass 2013. A heavy W boson that preferentially couples to quarks can be found through its decay to tb. A Kaluza-Klein gluon might have a significant branching ratio to tc. The final state in these searches has a lepton and neutrino from a W boson decay plus two jets, at least one of which is b-tagged. We give expected limits as a function of W boson and KKg masses for different collider energy and integrated luminosity options.

Single top quark cross section measurement in the t-channel at the high-luminosity LHC

We study the precision with which the t-channel single top quark production cross section is expected to be measured in future LHC runs at 14 TeV. The single top final state has a lepton and neutrino from the top quark decay plus two jets, one of which is required to be b-tagged. This measurement is done in the context of the Snowmass 2013 study for the low-luminosity 14 TeV and the high-luminosity 14 TeV LHC as well as for high-luminosity 33 TeV LHC.