The discovery of the fourth family at the LHC: what if?

Abstract

The first evidence of new strong interactions may be a sufficiently massive fourth family observed at the LHC. The fourth family masses, of the leptons in particular, are constrained by the electroweak precision data, and this leads to signatures at the LHC that may imply early discovery. We study the implications of this discovery from a bottom-up perspective, where effective 4-fermion operators model the dominant effects of the new dynamics. We identify simple approximate symmetries of these operators that may be required for realistic masses of the third and fourth families. The large top mass for instance is related to the structure of these operators.