A Mechanism for Kaluza-Klein Number Violation in UED and Implications for LHC

Abstract

If the Higgs does not propagate into an otherwise universal extra dimension, then tree-level Kaluza-Klein number is not conserved in the Yukawa interactions. This leads to mixing between zero-mode fermions and their associated Kaluza-Klein excitations. The effect can be quite large for the top quark, since its mass (171.4 plus or minus 2.1 GeV) is approximately one-half the current Tevatron mass bound (about 350-400 GeV) for Kaluza-Klein excitations of quarks with one universal extra dimension. In contrast to the SM, the bi-unitary transformation that diagonalizes the mass matrix does not diagonalize the effective 4D Yukawa coupling matrix because of the presence of the 5D kinetic terms. This leads to violation of tree-level Kaluza-Klein number conservation in the gauge sector due to a unique feature of the 5D theory. This allows Kaluza-Klein excitations of the fermions to be produced singly, and opens up new decay channels in the gauge sector. We compute the cross section for the production of the lowest-lying Kaluza-Klein excitations of the top and bottom quarks in the non-universal Higgs model at the Large Hadron Collider, and consider their subsequent decays. The effect is quite large: For example, pair production of Kaluza-Klein excitations of the bottom quark will lead to a pair of top quarks plus a pair of charged weak gauge bosons. Since the production is via the strong interaction, such final states stand out well against the Standard Model background, and are observable at the LHC for a wide range of compactification scales. Finally, we discuss the effects that such a model has on the T- parameter, and propose a model with maximal mixing where the compactification scale may be as large as a universal extra dimension.