Colorful Particle Production at High-Energy Muon Colliders
A high-energy $μ^+μ^-$ collider provides a wide variety of mechanisms for the production of new heavy particles. While the reach for such particles via the direct annihilation of $μ^+μ^-$ will approach the center-of-mass energy of the collider, the partonic fusions from gauge bosons, quarks, and gluons, originating from the incoming muon beams will open new channels for single production and pair production of particles with different quantum numbers. We present the production rates for a wide variety of colored states including color-triplets, color-sextets, color-octets, leptoquarks, and leptogluons. We find that pair production from the direct annihilation of $μ^+μ^-$ generally has a cross section of $0.1 - 1$ fb once above the production threshold. On the other hand, pair production through the quark and gluon content of the muon leads to a cross section of roughly $10^{-4}$ fb at the same particle mass. We perform simple estimations of the mass reach for each particle and find that a 10 TeV muon collider can extend the reach for color-triplets beyond what is possible at the high luminosity run of the Large Hadron Collider. Leptoquarks and leptogluons, with sensitivity driven by single production, can also be probed to higher masses at a muon collider than what the Large Hadron Collider can reach. A final example where a muon collider has superior reach is for color-octet scalars and vectors. Together, these cases illustrate the point that a muon collider is a competitive machine for searching for colored heavy particles, thus strengthening the motivation for such lepton colliders in the energy frontier. Although our study is focused on a muon collider, our results are largely applicable to high-energy $e^+e^-$ collisions as well.