Determination of the Spin of New Resonances in Electroweak Gauge Boson Pair Production at the LHC

Understand

The appearance of spin-1 resonances associated to the electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) sector is expected in many extensions of the Standard Model.

• We analyze the CERN Large Hadron Collider potential to probe the spin of possible new charged and neutral vector resonances through the purely leptonic processes pp --> Z^\prime --> l^+ l^{\prime -} Emiss_T, and pp --> W^\prime --> l^{\prime \pm} l^+ l^- Emiss_T, with l, l^\prime = e or \mu.
• We perform a model independent analysis and demonstrate that the spin of the new states can be determined with 99% CL in a large fraction of the parameter space where these resonances can be observed with 100 fb^{-1}.
• We show that the best sensitivity to the spin is obtained by directly studying correlations between the final state leptons, without the need of reconstructing the events in their center-of-mass frames.