Top anti-top pairs at the LHC heavy ion collision: a new interesting probe of quark gluon plasma

TL;DR

This paper explores top anti-top quark pair production in heavy ion collisions at the LHC as a novel probe for studying the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, focusing on medium modifications of jet distributions.

Contribution

It introduces the use of top anti-top pairs as a new observable to investigate jet energy loss and QGP characteristics in heavy ion collisions.

Findings

Significant modifications observed in dijet and trijet invariant mass distributions.

Peak position and shape changes can characterize jet energy loss in QGP.

Abstract

We investigate top anti-top quark pair production in lead-lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider with nucleon-nucleon center of mass energy of 5.5 TeV. Due to the very high temperature and energy density created in heavy ion collision, a new state of QCD matter known as Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) is expected to be produced. Top decay products loose energy inside the QGP medium. Therefore, we also study the medium modifications of different kinematic distributions. We observe significant modification in the dijets and trijets invariant mass distributions.We also found that the peak position and shape of the distributions could be used to characterize the nature of jet energy loss in the QGP.