Single top quark from technipion production

Abstract

We investigate the contribution of technicolor mechanisms to the production of single top quarks at hadron colliders. Technipions with mass larger than the top mass will decay predominantly to a top quark plus a bottom antiquark. We investigate two promising sub-processes: technipion plus W-boson via gluon-gluon fusion and technipion plus quark production via quark gluon interaction. The decay chain of technipion to top plus bottom quarks and then top to W plus bottom yields final states for the two subprocesses with, respectively, two W's and two bottom quarks and one W, two bottom quarks and a light quark. We calculate the total cross sections and the $p_{T}$ distributions for these technipion production mechanisms at Tevatron and LHC energies for a range of technipion masses, starting at 200 GeV. We study the backgrounds to our processes and the kinematic cuts that enhance the signal to background ratio and we report event rate estimates for the upgraded Tevatron and the LHC. Only the LHC has the potential to observe these processes.