Lepton-quark collisions at the Large Hadron Collider

Understand

Processes commonly studied at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are induced by quarks and gluons inside the protons of the LHC beams.

• In this letter we demonstrate that, since protons also contain leptons, it is possible to target lepton-induced processes at the LHC as well.
• In particular, by picking a lepton from one beam and a quark from the other beam, we present for the first time a comprehensive analysis of resonant single leptoquark (LQ) production at a hadron collider.
• In the case of minimal scalar LQs, we derive novel bounds that arise from the LHC Run II considering all possible flavour combinations of an electron or a muon and an up ($u$), a down ($d$), a strange or a charm quark.