Boosting low-mass hadronic resonances

Searches for new hadronic resonances typically focus on high-mass spectra due to overwhelming QCD backgrounds and detector trigger rates. We present a study of searches for relatively low-mass hadronic resonances at the LHC in the case that the resonance is boosted by recoiling against a well-measured high-p(T) probe such as a muon, photon or jet. The hadronic decay of the resonance is then reconstructed either as a single large-radius jet or as a resolved pair of standard narrow-radius jets, balanced in transverse momentum to the probe. We show that the existing 2015 LHC data set of pp collisions with integral Ldt = 4 fb(-1) should already have powerful sensitivity to a generic Z' model which couples only to quarks, for Z' masses ranging from 20-500 GeV/c(2).