Light non-degenerate composite partners at the LHC

Abstract

We study the phenomenological implications of a large degree of compositeness for the light generation quarks in composite pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone-boson Higgs models. We focus in particular on phenomenologically viable scenarios where the right-handed up-type quarks have a sizable mixing with the strong dynamics. For concreteness we assume the latter to be characterized by an SO(5)/SO(4) symmetry with fermionic resonances in the SO(4) singlet and fourplet representations. Singlet partners dominantly decay to a Higgs boson and jets. Since no dedicated searches are currently looking for these final states, singlet partners can still be rather light. Conversely, some fourplet partner components dominantly decay to an electroweak gauge boson and a jet, a type of signature which has been analysed at the LHC. We have reinterpreted various ATLAS and CMS analyses in order to constrain the parameter space of this class of models. In the limit of first two generation degeneracy, as in minimal flavor violation or U(2)-symmetric flavor models, fourplet partners need to be relatively heavy, with masses above 1.8 TeV, or the level of compositeness needs to be rather small. The situation is significantly different in models which deviate from the first two generation degeneracy paradigm, as charm quark parton distribution functions are suppressed relative to the up quark ones. We find that the right-handed charm quark component can be mostly composite together with their partners being as light as 600 GeV, while the right-handed up quark needs either to be mostly elementary or to have partners as heavy as 2 TeV. Models where right-handed up-type quarks are fully composite fermions are also analysed and yield qualitatively similar conclusions. Finally, we consider the case where both the fourplet and the singlet states are present. We demonstrate that in this case the fourplet bounds could be significantly weaken due to a combination of smaller production rates and the opening of new channels including cascade processes.