Aiming for Tops of ALPs with a Muon Collider

Abstract

Future muon colliders with center-of-mass energy of $\mathcal{O}(1-10)$ TeV can provide a clean high-energy environment with advantages in searches for TeV-scale axion-like particles (ALPs), pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons associated with spontaneously broken global symmetries, which are widely predicted in physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). We exploit ALP couplings to SM fermions, and guided by unitarity constraints, build a search strategy focusing on the ALP decay to top quark pairs at muon colliders. It is found that a large parameter space of TeV-scale ALPs with TeV-scale decay constants can be probed by utilizing the ALP-top quark coupling.

21 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (7)

• The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations
• Flavor probes of axion-like particles
• $\mu$TRISTAN
• Electroweak ALP Searches at a Muon Collider
• Unitarity constraints on ALP interactions
• Multi-brane cosmology
• High Quality Axion via a Doubly Composite Dynamics

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Multi Higgs production via photon fusion at future multi-TeV muon colliders
• ALP-ine quests at the LHC: hunting axion-like particles via peaks and dips in $t\bar{t}$ production
• Interplay of ALP Couplings at a Muon Collider
• Lepton Flavor Violation: From Muon Decays to Muon Colliders