Looking beyond the Standard Model with Third Generation Quarks at the LHC

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is at the frontier of collider physics today, probing new physics at unprecedented energy scales. Many theories of physics beyond the Standard Model seek to elucidate the underlying mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking. Given their large Yukawa couplings to the Higgs boson, third generations quarks of the Standard Model, and especially the top quark, play a key role in such theories. Therefore, new particles predicted by these theories often couple preferentially to top and bottom quarks. The favoured coupling to third generation can also be used to explain recently observed flavour physics anomalies in the LHCb, Babar or Belle experiments. This article will review recent searches for new physics performed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC, in final states containing top and bottom quarks. In particular, searches for vector-like quarks, leptoquarks, and heavy scalar and gauge bosons will be discussed.

Keywords

• particle physics
• top quark
• searches for new physics
• high energy physics
• beyond the standard model
• large hadron collider