Searching for Colorons at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

We investigate the prospects for the discovery of massive color-octet vector bosons at the CERN Large Hadron Collider with $\sqrt{s} = 14$ TeV. A phenomenological Lagrangian is adopted to evaluate the cross section of a pair of colored vector bosons (colorons, $\tilde{\rho}$) decaying into four colored scalar resonances (hyper-pions, $\tilde{\pi}$), which then decay into eight gluons. We include the dominant physics background from the production of $8g,7g1q, 6g2q$, and $5g3q$, and determine the masses of $\tilde{\pi}$ and $\tilde{\rho}$ where discovery is possible. For example, we find that a 5$\sigma$ signal can be established for $M_{\tilde{\pi}} \alt 495$ GeV ($M_{\tilde{\rho}} \alt 1650$ GeV). More generally we give the reach of this process for a selection of possible cuts and integrated luminosities.