Aditya Pathak: Using the W as a Standard Candle to Reach the top

Monday 5 Feb 2024, 15:00 → 17:00 Europe/Berlin

Abstract: Precision measurements of the top quark mass at hadron colliders have been notoriously difficult. This motivates the development of qualitatively new approaches to take advantage of the fact that the LHC is a top factory, with prospects for several millions of top quarks to be produced by the end of the high-luminosity phase. Recent advances in the jet substructure have enabled precise theoretical description of angular correlations in the hadronic energy flux. Their application to the precision mass measurements is, however, less direct since they measure a dimensionless angular scale.

Inspired by the use of standard candles in cosmology, in this talk I will show that a single energy correlator-based observable can be constructed that reflects the characteristic angular scales of both the $W$-boson and top quark masses. This gives a direct access to the dimensionless quantity $m_t/m_W$, from which $m_t$ can be extracted in a well-defined short distance scheme as a function of the well-known $m_W$. Using a Monte Carlo-based study, I will demonstrate a number of remarkable properties of this observable in terms of its neat theoretical properties, robustness against hadronization, underlying event, and variations in PDFs, and its statistical feasibility of its extraction from HL-LHC data. This proposal provides a road map for a rich program for precision top mass determination at the LHC with record precision.