Measurements of the charge asymmetry in top quark pair production at the LHC with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

The top quark, discovered in 1995 at the CDF and D0 experiments at Fermilab’s Tevatron proton-antiproton collider, is the heaviest known elementary particle, with a mass comparable to the atomic mass of tungsten. This property, not explained by the Standard Model (SM), gives a special role to the top quark in the context of theoretical models beyond the Standard Model. Many of the models predict that new particles would preferably couple with the top quark, due to its high mass. After a decade of studies at the Tevatron (2001-2011), no signs of new physics have been discovered in the properties of the top quark, with the exception of the forward-backward asymmetry in top quark pair production, where an excess of about two standard deviations from the SM prediction has been found. This measurement shows that, in average, the top quark in top-antitop events is produced in the proton direction more often than the antitop quark. Even though the SM predicts a small forward-backward asymmetry due to the strong interaction, the presence of new heavy particles contributing to the top-antitop pair production could cause the observed excess. Unfortunately the Tevatron operation terminated on September 2012, and the analysis of the full datasets collected by the CDF and D0 experiments did not provide a final answer with respect to this anomaly. This dissertation describes the precise measurement of the charge asymmetry AC in top-antitop pair production in proton-proton collisions at LHC, using the full dataset collected with the ATLAS detector at center-of-mass energies of 7 TeV and 8 TeV, corresponding to integrated luminosities of about 5 fb-1 and 20 fb-1, respectively. The LHC charge asymmetry, related to the Tevatron forward-backward asymmetry, is a complementary probe of the same new physics effects that could be responsible for the Tevatron excess. The lepton+jets channel is considered to perform inclusive and differential measurements of the charge asymmetry in top quark pair events. The kinematics of the top-antitop pair is reconstructed from the semileptonic decay products, and a Bayesian unfolding procedure is employed to estimate AC at the parton level. Using the dataset at 7 TeV, a 1% precision is achieved for the inclusive measurement. Differential AC measurements as a function of the invariant mass, the rapidity and the transverse momentum of the top-antitop pair are also presented. Using the dataset at 8 TeV, a 0.5% precision is achieved for the inclusive measurement, and the differential AC measurement as a function of the invariant mass of the top-antitop pair is performed as well. All measurements are found to be consistent with the SM predictions.

Date of Award	9 Sept 2014
Original language	English
Supervisor	Martine Bosman (Director), Aurelio Juste Rozas (Director) & Jose Maria Crespo Vicente (Tutor)