English

Composite top partners in exotic colour representations

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-05-07 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

Composite Higgs models with partial compositeness generically predict coloured fermionic resonances associated with the strong dynamics responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking. While most phenomenological studies have focused on colour-triplet and colour-octet top partners, several UV-complete hypercolour constructions also contain fermionic colour sextets. We present a systematic study of these states in the minimal model classes where they arise, constructing the relevant low-energy interactions and deriving their characteristic decay patterns. The sextets predominantly decay through coloured pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons, leading to top-rich final states, while additional channels with bb-jets and missing transverse energy can be important. We reinterpret existing ATLAS and CMS searches for high-multiplicity final states to derive the dedicated constraints on these resonances. For the benchmark spectra considered, current LHC data exclude individual sextet components up to masses in the 22.52-2.5 TeV regime, with stronger bounds when the full sextet multiplet is included, while conservative extrapolations to the HL-LHC indicate a reach close to 33 TeV. Our results therefore show that colour-sextet fermions provide a powerful and largely unexplored probe of composite Higgs models with partial compositeness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.04143,
  title  = {Composite top partners in exotic colour representations},
  author = {Giacomo Cacciapaglia and Rosy Caliri and Aldo Deandrea and Benjamin Fuks and Mark Goodsell and Jan Hadlik and Manuel Kunkel and Werner Porod},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.04143},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

23 pages, 6 figures, two appendices

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:51:35.198Z