Early discovery of top partners and test of the Higgs nature

Top partners from a new strong sector can be discovered soon, at the 8 TeV LHC, by analyzing their single production, which exhibits a large enhancement in the cross section compared to the analogous productions of bottom partners and exotic quarks. We analyze the subsequent decay of the top partners into a 125 GeV Higgs. This channel proves to be very promising for both the discovery of top partners and a test of the Higgs sector. For a reference value λ T∼=3 of the Higgs coupling to the top partner, we could have a discovery (observation) at the 8 TeV LHC, with 30fb -1, for top partner masses up to 760 (890) GeV. If the LHC and Tevatron excesses near 125 GeV are really due to a composite Higgs, naturalness arguments demand top partners below ∼1TeV. Our results highlight thus that the 8 TeV LHC already has a large sensitivity on probing the composite Higgs hypothesis. The LHC reach is even wider at √s=14TeV. With λ T∼=3 the LHC with 100fb -1 can observe (at 5σ) a Higgs from a top partner decay for masses of this latter up to ≃1450GeV. In the case that the top partner is as light as ≃500GeV, the 14 TeV LHC would be sensitive to the measure of the λ T∼ coupling in basically the full range λ T∼>1 predicted by the theory.