Discovery potential for T ′ → tZ in the trilepton channel at the LHC

The LHC discovery potential of heavy top partners decaying into a top quark and a Z boson is studied in the trilepton channel at s = 13 $$ \sqrt{s}=13 $$ TeV in the single production mode. The clean multilepton final state allows to strongly reduce the background contaminations and to reconstruct the T ′ mass. We show that a simple cut-and-count analysis probes the parameter space of a simplified model as efficiently as a dedicated multivariate analysis. The trilepton signature finally turns out to be as sensitive in the low T ′ mass region as the complementary channel with a fully hadronic top quark, and more sensitive in the large mass domain. The reinterpretation in terms of the top- Z -quark anomalous coupling is shown