Heavy-light decay topologies as a new strategy to discover a heavy gluon

We study the collider phenomenology of the lightest Kaluza-Klein excitation of the gluon, G*, in theories with a warped extra dimension. We do so by means of a two-site effective lagrangian which includes only the lowest-lying spin-1 and spin-1/2 resonances. We point out the importance of the decays of G* to one SM plus one heavy fermion, that were overlooked in the previous literature. It turns out that, when kinematically allowed, such heavy-light decays are powerful channels for discovering the G*. In particular, we present a parton-level Montecarlo analysis of the final state Wtb that follows from the decay of G* to one SM top or bottom quark plus its heavy partner. We find that at √s = 7 TeV and with 10fb -1 of integrated luminosity, the LHC can discover a KK gluon with mass in the range MG* = (1.8 - 2.2) TeV if its coupling to a pair of light quarks is gG*qq - = (0.2 - 0.5)g3. The same process is also competitive for the discovery of the top and bottom partners as well. We find, for example, that the LHC at √s = 7 TeV can discover a 1TeV KK bottom quark with an integrated luminosity of (5.3 - 0.61) fb -1 for gG*qq - = (0.2 - 0.5)53. © SISSA 2012.