Single Top-Quark Production in Flavor-Changing Z' Models

Abstract

In some models with an extra U(1) gauge boson Z', the gauge couplings of the Z' to different generations of fermions may not be universal. Flavor mixing in general can be induced at the tree level in the up-type and/or down-type quark sector after diagonalizing their mass matrices. In this work, we concentrate on the flavor mixing in the up-type quark sector. We deduce a constraint from D0-D0bar mixing. We study in detail single top-quark production via flavor-changing Z' exchange at the LHC and the ILC. We found that for a typical value of M_{Z'}=1 TeV, the production cross section at the LHC can be of the order of 1 fb. However, the background from the Standard Model single top-quark production makes it difficult to detect the flavor-changing Z' signal unless with a decent charm tagging method. On the other hand, at the ILC, the production cross section at the resonance energy of \sqrt{s} \approx M_{Z'} can reach a size of more than 100 fb. Even away from the resonance, the cross section at ILC is shown to be larger than the threshold of observability of 0.01 fb.