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.

Electroweak scale seesaw and heavy Dirac neutrino signals at LHC

Models of type I seesaw can be implemented at the electroweak scale in a natural way provided that the heavy neutrino singlets are quasi-Dirac particles. In such case, their contribution to light neutrino masses has the suppression of a small lepton number violating parameter, so that light neutrino masses can arise naturally even if the seesaw scale is low and the heavy neutrino mixing is large. We implement the same mechanism with fermionic triplets in type III seesaw, deriving the interactions of the new quasi-Dirac neutrinos and heavy charged leptons with the SM fermions. We then study the observability of heavy Dirac neutrino singlets (seesaw I) and triplets (seesaw III) at LHC. Contrarily to common wisdom, we find that heavy Dirac neutrino singlets with a mass around 100 GeV are observable at the 5 sigma level with a luminosity of 13 fb^-1. Indeed, in the final state with three charged leptons l+- l+- l-+, not previously considered, Dirac neutrino signals can be relatively large and backgrounds are small. In the triplet case, heavy neutrinos can be discovered with a luminosity of 1.5 fb^-1 for a mass of 300 GeV in the same channel.Comment: LaTeX 19 pages, 22 PS figures. Enlarged discussion and added a reference. Final version to appear in PL

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

Looking for signals beyond the neutrino Standard Model

Any new neutrino physics at the TeV scale must include a suppression mechanism to keep its contribution to light neutrino masses small enough. We review some seesaw model examples with weakly broken lepton number, and comment on the expected effects at large colliders and in neutrino oscillations.Comment: LaTeX 10 pages, 9 PS figures. Contribution to the Proceedings of the XXXI International School of Theoretical Physics "Matter To The Deepest" Ustron, Poland, September 5-11, 2007. Typos correcte

Top couplings and top partners

5th International Workshop on Top Quark Physics (TOP2012). Winchester (U.K.) september 16-21, 2012.We review the model-independent description of the couplings of the top quark to the Higgs and gauge bosons in theories beyond the Standard Model. Then we examine these couplings in the case of arbitrary heavy vector-like quarks mixing with the third family. We also discuss the couplings of these top partners, and comment on implications for LHC searches.This work has been supported by the MICINN project FPA2010-17915

Electroweak constraints on see-saw messengers and their implications for LHC

We review the present electroweak precision data constraints on the mediators of the three types of see-saw mechanisms. Except in the see-saw mechanism of type I, with the heavy neutrino singlets being mainly produced through their mixing with the Standard Model leptons, LHC will be able to discover or put limits on new scalar (see-saw of type II) and lepton (see-saw of type III) triplets near the TeV. If discovered, it may be possible in the simplest models to measure the light neutrino mass and mixing properties that neutrino oscillation experiments are insensitive to.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, To appear in the Proceedings of the Rencontres de Moriond 2008 EW Session, La Thuile (Italy), March 1-8, 200

Flavour and polarisation in heavy neutrino production at e+ e- colliders

We analyse l W nu production at ILC, paying special attention to the role of the final lepton flavour and beam polarisation in the search for a new heavy neutrino N. We show that a sizeable coupling to the electron V_eN ~ 10^-2 is necessary to have an observable signal in any of the channels, despite the fact that the signal may be more visible in muon or tau final states. The non-observation of a heavy neutrino at ILC will improve the present upper bound on its mixing with the electron by more than one order of magnitude, V_eN < 0.007 for m_N between 200 and 400 GeV.Comment: 17 pages, 5 PS figures. References added. To be published in PL

A clean signal for a top-like isosinglet fermion at the Large Hadron Collider

We predict a clean signal at the Large Hadron Collider ($\sqrt s)$=14 TeV for a scenario where there is a top-like, charge +2/3 vectorlike isosinglet fermion. Such a quark, via mixing with the standard model top, can undergo decays via both flavour-changing Z-boson coupling and flavour-changing Yukawa interactions. We concentrate on the latter channel, and study the situation where, following its pair-production, the heavy quark pair gives rise to two tops and two Higgs boson. We show that the case where each Higgs decays in the $b\bar{b}$ channel, there can be a rather distinct and background-free signal that can unveil the existence of the vectorlike isosinglet quark of this kind.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 4 table