Searching for Top Flavor Violating Resonances

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We study new top flavor violating resonances that are singly produced in association with a top at the LHC. Such top flavor violating states could be responsible for the Tevatron top forward-backward asymmetry. Since top flavor violating states can directly decay to a top (or anti-top) and jet, and are produced in conjunction with another (oppositely charged) top, the direct signature of such states is a t j (or tbar j) resonance in t tbar j events. In general, these states can be very light and have O(1) couplings to the top sector so that they are copiously produced. We present a search strategy and estimate the discovery potential at the early LHC by implementing the strategy on simulated data. For example, with 1 fb-1 at 7 TeV, we estimate that a W' coupling to dᵣ tbarᵣ can be constrained at the 3 sigma level for gᵣ = 1 and mW' = 200 GeV, weakening to gᵣ = 1.75 for mW' = 600 GeV. With the search we advocate here, a bound at a similar level could be obtained for top flavor violating Z's, as well as triplet and sextet diquarks.