Interpretations of anomalous LHC events with electrons and jets

Abstract

The CMS Collaboration has recently reported some excess events in final states with electrons and jets, in searches for leptoquarks and $W'$ bosons. Although these excesses may be due to some yet-to-be-understood background mismodeling, it is useful to seek realistic interpretations involving new particles that could generate such events. We show that resonant pair production of vector-like leptons that decay to an electron and two jets leads to kinematic distributions consistent with the CMS data.