Top partners at the LHC

The top quark sector may play a special role in the physics of electroweak symmetry breaking, due to the large top-Higgs Yukawa coupling. Naturalness suggests the existence of a top partner below or near the TeV scale. Here the phenomenology of such a top partner together with a neutral dark matter candidate is systematically analyzed. Instead of restricting ourselves to a particular model, different spin configurations (0, 1/2, and 1) and couplings for the new particles are considered. The current limits from the LHC and improved search strategies are discussed. Furthermore, it is studied how the properties of the top partner and DM particle, such as spin and couplings, can be determined from LHC data.