Associated production of Z boson and a pair of new quarks at the LHC

Abstract

The associated production of $Z$ boson and a pair of new quarks at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is studied. The cross sections for both sequential fermions and vector-like fermions are presented. It is found that for sequential fermions the cross sections can reach $1\sim 10^2$ fb for heavy quark mass $m_Q$ from 1000 GeV to 200 GeV. For vector-like quarks, the cross sections are suppressed by mixing parameter $\sinθ_L$. Focusing on process $pp \to b'b'$, we investigate the possibility of detecting the $6l+2j$ signal. For a $b'$ with light mass and a large branching ratio of $b'\to bZ$, it is found that only several signal events (parton level) can be produced with 1000 fb$^{-1}$ integrated luminosity. Although the signal events are rare, all the final states are produced centrally and multi lepton final states are clear at hadron collider, which could be easily detected.

11 pages,5 figures, accepted by Communications in Theoretical Physics