Paper detail

Fully hadronic decays of a singly produced vector-like top partner at the LHC

Single production of vector-like top partners is becoming a major focus of new searches, as the increasing mass limits on vector-like quarks obtained by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations are such that single production is becoming competitive with respect to pair production. Typically searches focus on decays containing leptons in the final state in order to have less background from the Standard Model processes. However the current centre of mass energies available in the latest LHC runs limit the searches to low masses. Fully hadronic final states may be an alternative option for discovery, as they allow a larger number of signal events if backgrounds can be kept under control. We study the fully hadronic decay of a singly produced vector-like top partner and we show a strategy to extract the signal over the background, considering as a benchmark the 20 fb^-1 of data collected at 8 TeV with the latest run of the LHC.