Dedicated strategies for triboson signals from cascade decays of vector resonances

New colorless electroweak (EW) charged spin-1 particles with mass of a few TeV arise in numerous extensions of the standard model (SM). Decays of such a vector into a pair of SM particles, either fermions or EW bosons, are well studied. Many of these models have an additional scalar, which can lead to (and even dominate in certain parameter regions) a novel decay channel for the heavy vector particles instead---into a SM EW boson and the scalar, which subsequently decays into a SM EW boson pair. In this work, we focus on the scalar being relatively heavy, roughly a factor of 2 lighter than the vector particles, rendering its decay products well separated. Such a cascade decay results in a final state with three isolated bosons. We argue that for this ``triboson'' signal the existing diboson searches are not quite optimal due to combinatorial ambiguity for three identical bosons, and in addition, due to a relatively small signal cross section determined by the heaviness of the decaying vector particle. In order to isolate the signal, we demonstrate that tagging all three bosons, followed by use of the full triboson invariant mass distribution as well as that of appropriate subsets of dibosons, is well motivated. We develop these general strategies in detail within the context of a specific class of models that are based on extensions of the standard warped extradimensional scenario. We also point out that a similar analysis would apply to models with an enlarged EW gauge sector in four dimensions, even if they involve a different Lorentz structure for the relevant couplings.

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