Search for a W' boson decaying to a bottom quark and a top quark in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

CMS [UCL] Basegmez, Suzan [UCL] Bruno, Giacomo [UCL] Castello, Roberto [UCL] Caudron, Adrien [UCL] Ceard, Ludivine [UCL] Delaere, Christophe [UCL] Du Pree, Tristan [UCL] Favart, Denis [UCL] Forthomme, Laurent [UCL] Hollar, Jonathan [UCL] Lemaitre, Vincent [UCL] Liao, Junhui [UCL] Militaru, Otilia [UCL] Nuttens, Claude [UCL] Pagano, Davide [UCL] Perrini, Lucia [UCL] Pin, Arnaud [UCL] Piotrzkowski, Krzysztof [UCL] Schul, Nicolas [UCL] Vizan Garcia, Jesús Manuel [UCL] et al.

Results are presented from a search for a W' boson using a dataset corresponding to 5.0 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity collected during 2011 by the CMS experiment at the LHC in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV. The W' boson is modeled as a heavy W boson, but different scenarios for the couplings to fermions are considered, involving both left-handed and right-handed chiral projections of the fermions, as well as an arbitrary mixture of the two. The search is performed in the decay channel W' to t b, leading to a final state signature with a single lepton (e, mu), missing transverse energy, and jets, at least one of which is tagged as a b-jet. A W' boson that couples to fermions with the same coupling constant as the W, but to the right-handed rather than left-handed chiral projections, is excluded for masses below 1.85 TeV at the 95% confidence level. For the first time using LHC data, constraints on the W' gauge coupling for a set of left- and right-handed coupling combinations have been placed. These results represent a significant improvement over previously published limits.