The standard model of particle physics can explain most measurements of elementary particle properties and interactions performed to date. However, it does not naturally explain the relatively light Higgs boson mass or the existence of small neutrino masses, and has no explanation for the dark matter observed in the universe. Many extensions to the standard model have been proposed to attempt to address these questions, and several predict the existence of heavy charged gauge bosons, usually referred to as W' bosons. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world and offers the opportunity to search for W' bosons using the CMS experiment, a large multi-purpose particle detector.
Results are presented from a search for a W' boson produced in proton-proton collisions at a center of mass energy sqrt(s)=8 TeV and decaying into a top and a bottom quark, using a dataset collected by the CMS experiment corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 fb^-1. Various models of W' boson production are studied by allowing for an arbitrary combination of left- and right-handed fermionic couplings. The analysis is based on the detection of events with an electron or muon, jets and missing transverse energy in the final state. No evidence for W' boson production is found and 95% confidence level upper limits are obtained on the production cross section for several mass hypotheses and compared to theoretical predictions. For W' bosons with purely right-handed couplings, and for those with left-handed couplings when ignoring interference effects, the observed 95% confidence level limit on the W' boson mass is M(W')>2.05 TeV. These are the most stringent limits obtained to date in this channel
