Resonant Bound State Production at e- e- Colliders

Observation of a sequence of resonances at an e-e- collider would suggest bound states of strongly coupled constituents carrying lepton number. Obvious candidates for these exotic constituents are leptoquarks and leptogluons. We show that under reasonable assumptions, the existence of one leptogluon flavor of appropriate mass can give rise to sizeable ``leptoglueball'' production rates and observable resonance peaks. In contrast, one needs two leptoquark flavors in order to produce the analogous ``leptoquarkonium'' states. Moreover, cross-generational leptoquark couplings are necessary to give observable event rates in many cases, and leptoquarkonium mass splittings are too small to resolve with realistic beam energy resolutions.Comment: 8 pages, 1 table, plain TeX, requires harvmac. Brief comparison to leptoglueball production at e+e- colliders added. Other minor changes. To appear in Physics Letters

Lepto-mesons, Leptoquarkonium and the QCD Potential

We consider bound states of heavy leptoquark-antiquark pairs (lepto-mesons) as well as leptoquark-antileptoquark pairs (leptoquarkonium). Unlike the situation for top quarks, leptoquarks (if they exist) may live long enough for these hadrons to form. We study the spectra and decay widths of these states in the context of a nonrelativistic potential model which matches the recently calculated two-loop QCD potential at short distances to a successful phenomenological quarkonium potential at intermediate distances. We also compute the expected number of events for these states at future colliders.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables, plain TeX, requires harvmac. References updated and minor clarifications made. To appear in Physics Letters

A Comparison of the Use of Binary Decision Trees and Neural Networks in Top Quark Detection

The use of neural networks for signal vs.~background discrimination in high-energy physics experiment has been investigated and has compared favorably with the efficiency of traditional kinematic cuts. Recent work in top quark identification produced a neural network that, for a given top quark mass, yielded a higher signal to background ratio in Monte Carlo simulation than a corresponding set of conventional cuts. In this article we discuss another pattern-recognition algorithm, the binary decision tree. We have applied a binary decision tree to top quark identification at the Tevatron and found it to be comparable in performance to the neural network. Furthermore, reservations about the "black box" nature of neural network discriminators do not apply to binary decision trees; a binary decision tree may be reduced to a set of kinematic cuts subject to conventional error analysis.Comment: 14pp. Plain TeX + mtexsis.tex (latter available through 'get mtexsis.tex'.) Two postscript files avail. by emai