Implications of a high-mass diphoton resonance for heavy quark searches

Heavy vector-like quarks coupled to a scalar S will induce a coupling of this scalar to gluons and possibly (if electrically charged) photons. The decay of the heavy quark into Sq, with q being a Standard Model quark, provides, if kinematically allowed, new channels for heavy quark searches. Inspired by naturalness considerations, we consider the case of a vector-like partner of the top quark. For illustration, we show that a singlet partner can be searched for at the 13 TeV LHC through its decay into a scalar resonance in the 2γ + ℓ + X final states, especially if the diphoton branching ratio of the scalar S is further enhanced by the contribution of non coloured particles. We then show that conventional heavy quark searches are also sensitive to this new decay mode, when S decays hadronically, by slightly tightening the current selection cuts. Finally, we comment about the possibility of disentangling, by scrutinising appropriate kinematic distributions, heavy quark decays to St from other standard decay modes.