Top effective operators at the ILC

We investigate the effect of top trilinear operators in t tbar production at the ILC. We find that the sensitivity to these operators largely surpasses the one achievable by the LHC either in neutral or charged current processes, allowing to probe new physics scales up to 4.5 TeV for a centre of mass energy of 500 GeV. We show how the use of beam polarisation and an eventual energy upgrade to 1 TeV allow to disentangle all effective operator contributions to the Ztt and gamma tt vertices.Comment: LaTeX 13 pages. Typos corrected. Final version in JHE

Top effective operators at the ILC

We investigate the effect of top trilinear operators in t tbar production at the ILC. We find that the sensitivity to these operators largely surpasses the one achievable by the LHC either in neutral or charged current processes, allowing to probe new physics scales up to 4.5 TeV for a centre of mass energy of 500 GeV. We show how the use of beam polarisation and an eventual energy upgrade to 1 TeV allow to disentangle all effective operator contributions to the Ztt and gamma tt vertices.Comment: LaTeX 13 pages. Typos corrected. Final version in JHE

Multiphoton signals of a (96 GeV?) stealth boson

Cascade decays of new scalars into final states with multiple photons and possibly quarks may lead to distinctive experimental signatures at high-energy colliders. Such signals are even more striking if the scalars are highly boosted, as when produced from the decay of a much heavier resonance. We study this type of events within the framework of the minimal stealth boson model, an anomaly-free $\text{U}(1)_{Y'}$ extension of the Standard Model with two complex scalar singlets. It is shown that, while those signals may have cross sections that might render them observable with LHC Run 2 data, they have little experimental coverage. We also establish a connection with a CMS excess observed in searches for new scalars decaying into diphoton final states near 96 GeV. In particular, we conclude that the predicted multiphoton signatures are compatible with such excess.Comment: LaTeX 32 pages. Comments added and discussions extended. Final version in EPJ

Multilepton production via top flavour-changing neutral couplings at the CERN LHC

Zt and gamma t production with Z -> l+ l- and t -> Wb -> l nu b provides the best determination of top flavour-changing neutral couplings at the LHC. The bounds on tc couplings eventually derived from these processes are similar to those expected from top decays, while the limits on tu couplings are better by a factor of two. The other significant Z and W decay modes are also investigated.Comment: 30 pages, 23 PS figures. Uses epsfig.sty and elsart.sty. Added some references and corrected some typos. Added more comments about statistics. Using elsart.sty reduces the size to 30 pages. Published in Nucl. Phys.

A closer look at the possible CMS signal of a new gauge boson

The CMS collaboration has recently reported a 2.8$\sigma$ excess of $eejj$ events with an invariant mass around 2 TeV. This observation can be explained in the context of standard model extensions with new gauge bosons $W'$, $Z'$ and heavy neutrinos coupling (mainly) to the electron. We discuss additional signals that allow to confirm or discard the $W'$ and $Z'$ hypotheses.Comment: ReVTeX 5 page