The LHC 2 TeV Diboson Resonances as Composite Vectors

Speaker: Lukas Pritchett

When: April 20, 2016 (Wed), 04:00PM to 05:00PM (add to my calendar)
Location: PRB 261

This event is part of the Preliminary Oral Exam.

Examining Committee: Kenneth Lane, Kevin Black, Liam Fitzpatrick and Claudio Chamon

Abstract:

The CMS and ATLAS experiments at the LHC recently reported excesses in production of pairs of weak bosons. These excesses may be associated with resonances 2 TeV invariant mass, hinting at new physics in the electroweak symmetry-breaking sector. New particles coupling to the weak bosons could be the first glimpse of new physics that helps resolve the current issues. With this in mind, we interpret the resonances as vector hadrons of a technicolor theory, motivated by a model where the Higgs boson is a quark / technifermion composite.

In this talk I will motivate the interactions of the technihadrons with the weak bosons, present the expected production rates at the LHC in Runs 1 and 2, and point out some of the experimental signatures of the model.

Most importantly, we find that at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV this model predicts production rates of a few fb, somewhat less than observed data from Run 1. Signatures to look for in Run 2 include production rates boosted by a factor of 5-7, an absence of $ZZ$ events, and bosons that are preferentially longitudinally polarized.