Searches for New High-Mass Resonances Decaying to Fermions at the LHC

Abstract

Accelerator searches for new resonances have a long-standing history of discoveries that have driven advances in our understanding of nature. Since 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has probed previously inaccessible energy scales, allowing it to search for new heavy resonances predicted by a wide range of theories beyond the standard model (BSM). In particular, resonance decays into fermionic final states are often seen as golden channels since they provide a clear signal, typically a peak in the invariant mass of the decay products over a smoothly-falling background distribution. This review summaries the key concepts of the experimental searches for new resonances decaying to fermions, in the context of the BSM theories that motivate them, and presents the latest results of the ATLAS and CMS experiments, focusing on the complete LHC run-2 dataset. Future prospects at the high-luminosity LHC and potential future colliders are also surveyed.