Catching a New Force by the Tail

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is sensitive to new heavy gauge bosons that produce narrow peaks in the dilepton invariant mass spectrum up to about $m_{Z'}\sim 5$ TeV. $Z'$s that are too heavy to produce directly can reveal their presence through interference with Standard Model dilepton production. We show that the LHC can significantly extend the mass reach for such $Z'$s by performing precision measurements of the shape of the dilepton invariant mass spectrum. The high luminosity LHC can exclude, with 95$\%$ confidence, new gauge bosons as heavy as $m_{Z'} \sim 10-20$ TeV that couple with gauge coupling strength of $g_{Z'} \sim 1-2$.