Leptoquarks decaying to a top quark and a charged lepton at hadron colliders

Abstract

We study the sensitivity of the Tevatron and the 7 TeV LHC to a leptoquark S coupling to a top quark and a charged lepton L (= e, mu, or tau). For the Tevatron, we focus on the case m_S < m_t, where the leptoquark pair production cross section is large, and the decay is three-body: S --> W b L^{\pm}. We argue that existing Tevatron observations could exclude m_S \lsim 160 GeV. For m_S > m_t, we show that the LHC experiments with low integrated luminosity could be sensitive to such leptoquarks decaying to tl^{\pm} with l= mu or tau.