Hunting for bileptons at hadron colliders

Abstract

I review possible signals at hadron colliders of bileptons, namely doubly-charged vectors or scalars with lepton number L=+/- 2, as predicted by a 331 model, based on a SU(3)_c x SU(3)_L x U(1)_X symmetry. In particular, I account for a version of the 331 model, wherein the embedding of the hypercharge is obtained with the addition of 3 exotic quarks and vector bileptons. Furthermore, a sextet of SU(3)_L, necessary to give masses to leptons, yields an extra scalar sector, including a doubly-charged Higgs, i.e. scalar bileptons. As bileptons are mostly produced in pairs at hadron colliders, their main signal is given by two same-sign lepton pairs at high invariant mass. Nevertheless, they can also decay according to non-leptonic modes, such as a TeV-scale heavy quark, charged 4/3 or 5/3, plus a Standard Model quark. I explore both leptonic and non-leptonic decays and the sensitivity to such processes of present and future hadron colliders.