Heavy leptons fromWdecay

We investigate the possibility of detecting a new heavy lepton at the $\overline{p}p$ collider through the decay mode $W\to L{\nu }_L$. We consider both the leptonic ($L\to e{\nu }_e{\overline{\nu }}_L$) and hadronic ($L\to \overline{q}Q{\overline{\nu }}_L$) sequential decays of the $L$. We present detailed calculations to show that the leptonic decay rate is exceeded, for all kinematic ranges, by background contributions from $W\to e{\nu }_e$ and $W\to \tau {\nu }_{\tau }\to e{\nu }_e{\overline{\nu }}_{\tau }{\nu }_{\tau }$ decays. On the other hand, the hadronic decay leads to a promising, distinctive signature: a large missing transverse momentum balanced by two recognizable jets. Selective cuts can be imposed to remove background contributions, and the remaining event rate is about 10% of the $W\to e\nu$ rate if the mass of the lepton is below 50 GeV.