2016/09/18 by Cerrito, Lucio, Millar, Declan, Moretti, Stefano +1
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1609.05540
The sensitivity of top quark pair production at the Large Hadron Collider to the presence and nature of an underlying Z' boson is studied, accounting for six-fermion decay with full tree-level Standard Model ttbar interference and all intermediate particles allowed off-shell. Focus is placed on the lepton-plus-jets final state, emulating experimental conditions, including kinematic requirements and top quark pair reconstruction in the presence of missing transverse energy and combinatorial ambiguity in jet-top assignment. Considering a resonance with mass of 4 TeV, and assuming 300 inverse fb of proton-proton collisions with a centre of mass energy of 13 TeV data, a combination of forward-backward and top polarisation asymmetries are shown to distinguish Z' embedded by different classes of Grand-Unified-Theory-inspired models. In combination with the differential cross section, they may be used to increase the significance of the signal when tested against the Standard Model, as shown using a likelihood-based statistical test.