Eur. Phys. J. C (2008) 56: 537-543
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-008-0685-4

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Single production of fourth-family quarks at the LHC

¹ Department of Physics, Theory Division, CERN, 1211, Geneva 23, Switzerland
² Faculty of Sciences, Department of Physics, Ankara University, 06100, Tandogan, Ankara, Turkey
³ Faculty of Art and Sciences, Department of Physics, Dumlupınar University, Central Campus, Kütahya, Turkey
⁴ Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712-0264, USA
⁵ Institute of Physics, Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, 370143, Baku, Azerbaijan

^* e-mail: ocakir@science.ankara.edu.tr

Received: 30 June 2008
Published online: 19 August 2008

Abstract

We study the single production of fourth-family quarks through the process pp→Q′jX at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We have calculated the decay widths and branching ratios of the fourth-family quarks (b′ and t′) in the mass range 300–800 GeV. The cross sections for the signal and background processes have been calculated in a Monte Carlo framework. It is shown that the LHC can discover single t′ and b′ quarks if the CKM matrix elements |V _t′q |,|V _qb′|≳0.01.