String resonances at hadron colliders

We consider extensions of the standard model based on open strings ending on D-branes, with gauge bosons due to strings attached to stacks of D-branes and chiral matter due to strings stretching between intersecting D-branes. Assuming that the fundamental string mass scale M-s is in the TeV range and that the theory is weakly coupled, we discuss possible signals of string physics at the upcoming HL-LHC run (integrated luminosity = 3000 fb(-1)) with a center-of-mass energy of root s = 14 TeV and at potential future pp colliders, HE-LHC and VLHC, operating at root s = 33 and 100 TeV, respectively (with the same integrated luminosity). In such D-brane constructions, the dominant contributions to full-fledged string amplitudes for all the common QCD parton subprocesses leading to dijets and gamma + jet are completely independent of the details of compactification and can be evaluated in a parameter-free manner. We make use of these amplitudes evaluated near the first (n = 1) and second (n = 2) resonant poles to determine the discovery potential for Regge excitations of the quark, the gluon, and the color singlet living on the QCD stack. We show that for string scales as large as 7.1 TeV (6.1 TeV) lowest massive Regge excitations are open to discovery at the >= 5 sigma in dijet (gamma + jet) HL-LHC data. We also show that for n = 1 the dijet discovery potential at HE-LHC and VLHC exceedingly improves: up to 15 TeV and 41 TeV, respectively. To compute the signal-to-noise ratio for n = 2 resonances, we first carry out a complete calculation of all relevant decay widths of the second massive level string states (including decays into massless particles and a massive n = 1 and a massless particle), where we rely on factorization and conformal field theory techniques. Helicity wave functions of arbitrary higher spin massive bosons are also constructed. We demonstrate that for string scales M-s less than or similar to 10.5 TeV (M-s less than or similar to 28 TeV) detection of n = 2 Regge recurrences at HE-LHC (VLHC) would become the smoking gun for D-brane string compactifications. Our calculations have been performed using a semianalytic parton model approach which is cross checked against an original software package. The string event generator interfaces with HERWIG and Pythia through BlackMax. The source code is publicly available in the hepforge repository.