Pair Production of Color-Octet Scalars at the LHC

Heavy colored scalar particles, which exist in many models of new physics, can be pair produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) via gluon-gluon fusion and possibly form quarkonium-like bound states. If the scalars are also charged under the electroweak gauge group, these bound states can then decay into electroweak bosons. This yields a resonant cross section for final states such as gamma gamma that can exceed Standard Model backgrounds. This paper studies this process in the Manohar-Wise model of color-octet scalars (COS). Important threshold logarithms and final state Coulomb-like QCD interactions are resummed using effective field theory. We compute the resummed cross section for gluon-gluon fusion to COS pairs at the LHC as well as the resonant cross section for octetonium decaying to gamma gamma. The latter cross section exceeds the Standard Model di-photon cross section when the COS mass is less than 500 (350) GeV for sqrt{s} = 14 (7) TeV. Nonobservation of resonances below these energies can significantly improve existing bounds on COS masses.