We investigate the quark-lepton symmetric model of Foot and Lew in the context of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In this “bottom-up” extension to the standard model, quark-lepton symmetry is achieved by introducing a gauged “leptonic color” symmetry which is spontaneously broken above the electroweak scale. If this breaking occurs at the TeV scale, then we expect new physics to be discovered at the LHC. We examine three areas of interest: the $Z^{\prime }$ heavy neutral gauge boson, charge $\pm 1/2$ exotic leptons, and a color triplet scalar diquark. We find that the LHC has already explored and/or will explore new parameter space for these particles over the course of its lifetime.

• Received 14 December 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.85.074012