Illuminating New Electroweak States at Hadron Colliders

Ahmed Ismael, Eder Izaguirre, and Brian Shuve

Physical Review D 94 (2016) 15001

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel powerful strategy to perform searches for new electroweak states. Uncolored electroweak states appear in generic extensions of the Standard Model (SM) and yet are challenging to discover at hadron colliders. This problem is particularly acute when the lightest state in the electroweak multiplet is neutral and all multiplet components are approximately degenerate. In this scenario, production of the charged fields of the multiplet is followed by decay into nearly invisible states; if this decay occurs promptly, the only way to infer the presence of the reaction is through its missing energy signature. Our proposal relies on emission of photon radiation from the new charged states as a means of discriminating the signal from SM backgrounds. We demonstrate its broad applicability by studying two examples: a pure Higgsino doublet and an electroweak quintuplet field.