Forward-Backward Asymmetry in $t\overline{t}$ Production from Flavor Symmetries

Forward-Backward Asymmetry in $t \bar{t}$ Production from Flavor Symmetries

Benjamín Grinstein, Alexander L. Kagan, Michael Trott, and Jure Zupan

Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 012002 – Published 28 June 2011

Abstract

We show that the forward-backward asymmetry in top quark pair production can be enhanced by fields that transform nontrivially under the flavor group and satisfy minimal flavor violation, while at the same time the constraints from associated effects on the $d σ (t \bar{t}) / d M_{t \bar{t}}$ distribution, dijet resonance searches, same-sign top-pair production, and other phenomenology are satisfied. We work out two examples in detail: one where a scalar color antisextet field that is also an antisextet of $SU (3)_{U}$ enhances the forward-backward asymmetry and one where the enhancement arises from a vector color octet field that is also an octet of $SU (3)_{U}$ .

Received 25 February 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.012002

Authors & Affiliations

Benjamín Grinstein^1,*, Alexander L. Kagan^2,3,†, Michael Trott^4,‡, and Jure Zupan^2,§

¹Department of Physics, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA
²Department of Physics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221, USA
³Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
⁴Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2J-2W9, Canada

^*bgrinstein@physics.ucsd.edu
^†kaganalexander@gmail.com
^‡mtrott@perimeterinstitute.ca
^§On leave of absence from Josef Stefan Institute and University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia. jure.zupan@cern.ch