Novel flavour-changing neutral currents in the top quark sector

Abstract

We demonstrate that avour-changing neutral currents in the top sector, mediated by leptophilic scalars at the electroweak scale, can easily arise in scenarios of new physics, and in particular in composite Higgs models. We moreover show that such interactions are poorly constrained by current experiments, while they can be searched for at the LHC in rare top decays and, more generally, in the channels pp ! tS(S) + j, with S ! `+`-. We provide dedicated analyses in this respect, obtaining that cut-o scales as large as 90TeV can be probed with an integrated luminosity of L = 150 fb-1.