Single top quark from technipion production

Abstract

We investigate the contribution of technicolor mechanisms to the production of single top quarks at hadron colliders. Technipions with a mass larger than the top quark mass will decay predominantly to a top quark plus a bottom antiquark. We investigate two promising subprocesses: color-octet technipion plus a W boson via gluon-gluon fusion and technipion plus quark production via quark gluon interaction. The decay chain of a technipion to a top quark plus bottom quarks and then a top quark to a W plus bottom yields final states for the two subprocesses with, respectively, two W’s and two bottom quarks and one W, two bottom quarks, and a light quark. We calculate the total cross sections and the pT distributions for these technipion production mechanisms at CERN LHC energies for a range of technipion masses, starting at 200 GeV. We study the backgrounds to our processes and the kinematic cuts that enhance the signal to background ratio and we report event rate estimates for the upgraded Fermilab Tevatron and the LHC. Only the LHC has the potential to observe these processes.