Vectorlike leptons at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

We study the prospects for excluding or discovering vectorlike leptons using multilepton events at the LHC. We consider models in which the vectorlike leptons decay to tau leptons. If the vectorlike leptons are weak isosinglets, then discovery in multilepton states is found to be extremely challenging. For the case that the vectorlike leptons are weak isodoublet, we argue that there may be an opportunity for exclusion for masses up to about 275 GeV by direct searches with existing LHC data at sqrt{s}=8 TeV. We also discuss prospects for exclusion or discovery at the LHC with future sqrt{s}=13 TeV data.