Single top: prospects at LHC

TL;DR

This paper reviews the prospects of measuring single top quark production at the LHC, emphasizing its role in probing the Wtb vertex and as a background in Higgs and BSM searches, based on simulated data analyses.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of expected uncertainties in single top production cross section measurements across different channels and experiments at the LHC.

Findings

Estimated uncertainties for cross section measurements in various channels

Comparison between ATLAS and CMS expected performance

Implications for top quark physics and BSM searches

Abstract

Single top quark processes are interesting as direct probes of the $Wtb$ vertex, and are also an important background in searches of the Higgs boson and beyond the standard model physics. Both ATLAS and CMS have performed studies with simulated data to estimate the expected uncertainty on the production cross section measurements of the three single top processes ($t$-channel, s-channel, $tW$ production) in the first years of LHC operations. Results in the different channels and for the two experiments are reported.