Single top quark production and decay in the t-channel at next-to-leading order at the LHC

TL;DR

The paper provides a comprehensive NLO QCD analysis of t-channel single top and antitop production at the LHC across 7, 10, and 14 TeV, including corrections to both production and decay. It decomposes O(αs) effects into LIGHT, HEAVY, and TDEC contributions, and examines inclusive cross sections, scale/PDF/mass dependencies, and detailed kinematic distributions under realistic jet and lepton cuts. It demonstrates substantial three-jet activity at the LHC, analyzes spectator-jet identification and top reconstruction challenges, and evaluates top polarization across multiple spin bases, finding that polarization remains highly observable in suitable bases though degraded by NLO and reconstruction. The results have direct implications for precision |V_tb| determinations and SM tests, highlighting the importance of proper jet reconstruction, acceptance modeling, and spin-correlation measurements in LHC analyses.

Abstract

We present a study of single top and single antitop quark production in the t-channel mode at the LHC pp collider at 7 TeV, 10 TeV and 14 TeV, including next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production and decay of the top quark. We discuss the effects of different O(alpha_s) contributions on the inclusive cross section and important kinematic distributions, after imposing the relevant cuts to select t-channel single top quark events.

Figures (26)

• Figure 1: Representative Feynman diagram for $t$-channel single top quark production.
• Figure 2: Inclusive $t$-channel single top quark cross section at the LHC proton-proton collider as a function of CM energy for a top quark mass of 173 GeV.
• Figure 3: Top quark mass dependence of the inclusive $t$-channel single top quark cross section (a) at 7 TeV and (b) at 14 TeV for the LHC proton-proton collider.
• Figure 4: Inclusive $t$-channel single top quark production cross section at a CM energy of (a) 7 TeV and (b) 14 TeV at the LHC for $m_{t}=173$ GeV, versus the ratio of the factorization scale $\mu_{F}$ to its typical value $\mu_{0}=m_{t}$.
• Figure 5: Pictorial illustration of the $t$-channel process and the final state notation used in this paper.