Distinguishing signatures of scalar leptoquarks at hadron and muon colliders

While the hunt for new states beyond the standard model (SM) goes on for various well motivated theories, the leptoquarks are among the most appealing scenarios at recent times due to a series of tensions observed in $B$-meson decays. We consider two scalar leptoquarks, one being a singlet and the other a triplet under the electroweak gauge group, and respectively contributes to charged and neutral current $B$-meson decays. Focusing on the single production of these two scalar leptoquarks, we perform a PYTHIA-based simulation considering all the dominant SM backgrounds at the current and future setups of the large hadron collider. The final state consisting of a $b$ and $\tau$ jets provides highest reach for the singlet leptoquark, whereas, for the triplet leptoquark $1-{\rm jet}+2\mu + \require{cancel}\cancel{p_{T}}$ topology is the most optimistic signature at the hadron colliders probing leptoquark couplings to fermions at $\mathcal{O}(10^{-1})$ value for a TeV mass range leptoquark. The invariant mass edge distribution is found to be instrumental in determination of the leptoquark mass scale at the LHC. Various distinguishing signatures are studied which can easily discriminate different components of the triplet leptoquark. Establishing a direct connection with the neutral current $B$-anomalies, we perform simulations for these leptoquarks at the proposed multi-TeV muon collider, where the background free environment can probe $\mathcal{O}(10^{-2})$ value of the leptoquark couplings to fermions for $\mathcal{O}(10)$ TeV leptoquark mass via $2-{\rm jet}+2\mu$ signature.