Warped gravitons at the CERN LHC and beyond

We study the production and decay of Kaluza-Klein (KK) gravitons at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in the framework of a warped extra dimension in which the standard model (SM) fields propagate. Such a scenario can provide solutions to both the Planck-weak hierarchy problem and the flavor puzzle of the SM. In this scenario, the production via qq¯ annihilation and decays to the conventional photon and lepton channels are highly suppressed. However, we show that graviton production via gluon fusion followed by decay to longitudinal Z/W can be significant; vector boson fusion is found to be a subdominant production mode. In particular, the golden ZZ decay mode offers a distinctive 4-lepton signal that could lead to the observation at the LHC with 300fb^-1 (SLHC with 3ab^-1) of a KK graviton with a mass up to ∼2 (∼3) TeV for the ratio of the AdS₅ curvature to the Planck scale modestly above unity. We argue that (contrary to the lore) such a size of the curvature scale can still be within the regime of validity of the framework. Upgrades beyond the SLHC luminosity are required to discover gravitons heavier than ∼4TeV, as favored by the electroweak and flavor precision tests in the simplest such models.