Large transverse momentum W production at Hadron colliders

Abstract

Motivated by the recent observations of events in which a large transverse momentum W has been produced together with two energetic jets at the CERN proton—antiproton collider, we consider standard model processes in which a W is created in association with a second weak boson which then decays hadronically into two jets. We find that the production and decay of heavy quark—antiquark pairs can give rise to an observable number of (WW) events in existing collider data samples if the heavy-quark mass is close to the W mass. We calculate the expected event rates for proton—antiproton colliders operating in the energy range 0.6–2.0 TeV, and discuss the kinematic properties of the events, and the identity of the heavy quark Q which could be either the top quark, or a down-type quark from a new (fourth) generation.