Heavy Graviton Search at the Large Hadron Collider*

The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, aimed to relate particles and forces, fails to build such relation for gravitation. Certain theories predicting “Graviton,” mediator for gravitation, to be a massive (hence potentially detectable) spin-2 particle have raised high experimental interest. Yet so far no search has discovered such particle at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This research develops a search methodology for a massive spin-2 particle using Vector Boson Fusion (VBF) processes at the LHC. We consider potential reasons the current searches, mainly relying on Drell-Yan (DY) processes, have observed no graviton, including potentially low coupling strength between the graviton, quarks, and gluons. The VBF topology, with no reliance upon the QCD coupling strength, offers an alternative and complementary search strategy.  We further combine the VBF topology with the diphoton decay channel, a novel search for the LHC.  We show that the requirement of a high mass diphoton pair combined with two high $p_T$ forward jets with large dijet mass and with large separation in pseudorapidity can significantly reduce the SM backgrounds. We expect discovery potential for TeV scale graviton masses.