Mass-degenerate Heavy Vector Mesons at Hadron Colliders

Abstract

We study the LHC phenomenology of a couple of mass-degenerate heavy new gauge bosons with the quantum numbers of the Z and photon. We give a leading-order estimate of the number of events expected in Drell-Yan processes in terms of the parameters of the model (mass and coupling) and of the LHC machine specifications (luminosity and energy). We consider the feasibility of measuring a forward-backward asymmetry for various choices of the parameters and estimate the potential reach. We comment on how the results may affect future collider design and the results for a specific model of electro-weak symmetry breaking by way of example.