Common exotic decays of top partners

Understand

Many standard model extensions that address the hierarchy problem contain Dirac-fermion partners of the top quark, which are typically expected around the TeV scale.

• Searches for these vector-like quarks mostly focus on their decay into electroweak gauge bosons and Higgs plus a standard model quark.
• In this article, backed by models of composite Higgs, we propose a set of simplified scenarios, with effective Lagrangians and benchmarks, that include more exotic decay channels, which modify the search strategies and affect the bounds.
• Analysing several classes of underlying models, we show that exotic decays are the norm and commonly appear with significant rates.