Hadronic production of light color-triplet Higgs bosons: an alternative signature for GUT

The conventional signature for grand unified theories (GUT) is the proton decay. Recently, some models in extra dimensions or with specific discrete symmetries, which aim at solving the doublet-triplet problem, allow the color-triplet in the TeV mass region by suppressing the Yukawa couplings of the triplets to matter fermions. We study the hadronic production and detection of these TeV colored Higgs bosons as an alternative signature for GUT, which would behave like massive stable charged particles in particle detectors producing a striking signature of a charged track in the central tracking system and being ionized in the outer muon chamber. We found that the LHC is sensitive to a colored Higgs boson up to about 1.5 TeV. If the color-triplets are stable in cosmological time scale, they may constitute an interesting fraction of the dark matter.