UC Irvine

We explore the discovery prospects for B′B̄′ pair production followed by direct decays B′→bX, where B′ is a new quark and X is a long-lived neutral particle. We develop optimized cuts in the (mB′,mX) plane and show that the 7 TeV LHC with an integrated luminosity of 1(10)fb-1 may exclude masses up to m B′∼620(800)GeV, completely covering the mass range allowed for new quarks that get mass from electroweak symmetry breaking. This analysis is applicable to other models with bb̄E□T signals, including supersymmetric models with bottom squarks decaying directly to neutralinos, and models with exotic quarks decaying directly to GeV-scale dark matter. To accommodate these and other interpretations, we also present model-independent results for the bb̄E□T cross section required for exclusion and discovery. © 2011 American Physical Society.