The quark and lepton sectors of the standard model are strikingly similar in terms of the number of particles and generations. This possibly hints at a fundamental symmetry existing between the two sectors. Indeed, such a symmetry has been part of many new physics scenarios, namely composite models, technicolor, grand unied SU(5), Pati-Salam SU(4) and E6 superstring-inspired theories. These models give rise to an entirely new class of particles called leptoquarks that carry both baryon and lepton numbers - a signature of their coupling to quarks and leptons. We report results from a dedicated search for scalar leptoquarks performed by the CMS experiment using 35.9/fb of proton-proton collision data recorded at 13 TeV.
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