Abstract

Measurements of the top--antitop quark pair production charge asymmetry in the dilepton channel, characterized by two high-${p}_{\rm{T}}$ leptons (electrons or muons), are presented using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $20.3$ $\textrm{fb}^{-1}$ from $pp$ collisions at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Inclusive and differential measurements as a function of the invariant mass, transverse momentum, and longitudinal boost of the $t\bar{t}$ system are performed both in the full phase space and in a fiducial phase space closely matching the detector acceptance. Two observables are studied: $A^{\ell\ell}_{\textrm{C}}$ based on the selected leptons and $A^{t\bar{t}}_{\textrm{C}}$ based on the reconstructed $t\bar{t}$ final state. The inclusive asymmetries are measured in the full phase space to be $A^{\ell\ell}_{\textrm{C}} = 0.008 \pm 0.006$ and $A^{t\bar{t}}_{\textrm{C}} = 0.021 \pm 0.016$, which are in agreement with the Standard Model predictions of $A^{\ell\ell}_{\textrm{C}} = 0.0064 \pm 0.0003 $ and $A^{t\bar{t}}_{\textrm{C}} = 0.0111 \pm 0.0004$.

Highlights

  • The top quark is the heaviest known elementary particle

  • Such a role could be elucidated via precision tests of the Standard Model (SM) in large data samples of topantitop quark pair events collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in proton-proton collisions

  • The production of tt pairs at hadron colliders is symmetric under charge conjugation at leading order (LO) in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), i.e., the probability of a top quark flying in a given direction is the same as for an antitop quark [6]

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The top quark is the heaviest known elementary particle. Its large mass suggests that it may play a special role in theories of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) [1,2,3,4,5]. Such a role could be elucidated via precision tests of the Standard Model (SM) in large data samples of topantitop quark pair (tt) events collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in proton-proton (pp) collisions One such test is the measurement of the charge asymmetry. Several measurements were reported by the CDF and D0 experiments [7,8,9,10,11,12] in dileptonic and semileptonic tt events For these measurements, the direction of the initial quark can be assumed to be the direction of the proton, and the direction of the antiquark that of the antiproton, which yields straightforward access to the asymmetry.

ATLAS DETECTOR
DATA AND MONTE CARLO SAMPLES
EVENT SELECTION AND BACKGROUND ESTIMATION
OBSERVABLES
ASYMMETRY MEASUREMENTS
Particle-level objects and fiducial region
Unfolding
Binning optimization and asymmetry extraction
SYSTEMATIC UNCERTAINTIES
Lepton-related uncertainties
Jet-related uncertainties
Missing transverse momentum
Background-related uncertainties
Signal modeling uncertainties
Top-quark kinematic reconstruction
Nonclosure uncertainties
MC sample size
Summary of systematic uncertainties
VIII. RESULTS
Findings
CONCLUSION
Full Text
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