Hitting two BSM particles with one lepton-jet: search for a top partner decaying to a dark photon, resulting in a lepton-jet

Abstract

A maverick top partner model, decaying to a dark photon was suggested. The dark photon decays to two overlapping electrons for dark photon masses of $\approx 100$ GeV, and results in a so-called lepton-jet. The event includes a top quark as well, which results in events with two boosted objects, one heavy and the other light. We propose a search strategy exploiting the unique signal topology. We show that for a set of kinematic selections, both in hadronic and leptonic decay channel of the SM top quark, almost all background can be eliminated, leaving enough signal events up to top partner mass of about 3 TeV for the search to be viable at the LHC.

Prepared for submission to SciPost Physics (updated in response to referee report)

References in corpus (8)

• An Introduction to PYTHIA 8.2
• New Fixed-Target Experiments to Search for Dark Gauge Forces
• Illuminating Dark Photons with High-Energy Colliders
• Robust Independent Validation of Experiment and Theory: Rivet version 3
• On the Interpretation of Top Partners Searches
• Searches for dark photons at accelerators
• Differential top-antitop cross-section measurements as a function of observables constructed from final-state particles using pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV in the ATLAS detector
• The Search for Dark Matter

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Exploring maverick top partner decays at the LHC
• Dark Sector Showers in the Lund Jet Plane
• Machine learning tagged boosted dark photon: A signature of fermionic portal matter at the LHC