Manifestations of Top Compositeness at Colliders

Abstract

We explore the possibility that the right-handed top quark is composite, identifying possible signatures of compositeness and how they might manifest themselves at the LHC and Tevatron. We perform a complete analysis of the dimension six modifications of the top coupling to gluons and find that cancellations among operators in the t\bar{t} rate allow for very low compositeness scales, but this can be drastically improved by looking at kinematic distributions. Turning to the LHC, we examine four top production from a dimension six four-top operator and estimate the LHC with 100 {\rm fb}^{-1} collected luminosity to be sensitive to compositeness scales as high as 5 TeV.