Early discovery of top partners and test of the Higgs nature

Top partners from a new strong sector can be discovered soon, at the 8 TeV LHC, by analyzing their single production, which exhibits a large enhancement in the cross section compared to the analogous productions of bottom partners and exotic quarks. We analyze the subsequent decay of the top partners into a 125 GeV Higgs. This channel proves to be very promising for both the discovery of top partners and a test of the Higgs sector. For a reference value lambda((T) over tilde) = 3 of the Higgs coupling to the top partner, we could have a discovery (observation) at the 8 TeV LHC, with 30 fb(-1), for top partner masses up to 760 (890) GeV. If the LHC and Tevatron excesses near 125 GeV are really due to a composite Higgs, naturalness arguments demand top partners below similar to 1 TeV. Our results highlight thus that the 8 TeV LHC already has a large sensitivity on probing the composite Higgs hypothesis. The LHC reach is even wider at root s = 14 TeV. With lambda((T) over tilde) = 3 the LHC with 100 fb(-1) can observe (at 5 sigma) a Higgs from a top partner decay for masses of this latter up to similar or equal to 1450 GeV. In the case that the top partner is as light as similar or equal to 500 GeV, the 14 TeV LHC would be sensitive to the measure of the lambda((T) over tilde) coupling in basically the full range lambda((T) over tilde) > 1 predicted by the theory.