Hadronically decaying color-adjoint scalars at the LHC

Abstract

We study the phenomenology of the pair-production of scalar color-octet electroweak singlet states at the LHC. Such states appear in many extensions of the Standard Model. They can be pair-produced copiously at the LHC and will signal themselves as resonances in multijet final states. Beyond the QCD pair-production process we consider a vectorlike confinement scenario with an additional color-octet vector state. These vector particles can be produced in the s-channel and through their decay contribute to the scalar pair production. We point out the differences between the two hypotheses and device a strategy to distinguish them.