A Search for Exotic Particles Decaying to WZ Pairs in pp Collisions at 7 TeV

Abstract

A search for exotic particles decaying via WZ to final states with electrons and muons is performed using a data sample of pp collisions collected at 7 TeV center-of-mass energy by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.98 inverse femtobarns. A cross section measurement for the production of WZ is also performed on a subset of the collision data. No significant excess is observed over the Standard Model background, so lower bounds at the 95% confidence level are set on the production cross sections of hypothetical particles decaying to WZ in several theoretical scenarios. Assuming the Sequential Standard Model, W' bosons with masses below 1143 GeV are excluded. New limits are also set for several configurations of Low-Scale Technicolor