Signal background interference effects in heavy scalar production and decay to a top-anti-top pair

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the interference between a heavy scalar resonance and the top-antitop background affects the production and decay signals at the LHC, emphasizing the importance of higher-order QCD effects on the line-shape and cross-section.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of interference effects in heavy scalar top pair production, including estimates of NLO corrections and their impact on experimental constraints.

Findings

Interference significantly distorts the invariant mass distribution.

Higher-order QCD effects alter the predicted line-shape.

Interference effects are crucial for interpreting LHC resonance searches.

Abstract

We analyse the production of a top quark pair through a heavy scalar at the LHC. We first review the main features of the signal as well as the interference with the top-anti-top background at leading order in QCD. We then study higher order QCD effects. While the background and the signal can be obtained at NNLO and NLO in QCD respectively, that is not the case for their interference, which is currently known only at LO. In order to improve the accuracy of the prediction for the interference term, we consider the effects of extra QCD radiation, i.e. the $2 \to 3$ (loop-induced) processes and obtain an estimate of the NLO corrections. As a result, we find that the contribution of the interference is important both at the total cross-section level and, most importantly, for the line-shape of the heavy scalar. In particular for resonances with widths larger than a couple of percent of the resonance mass, the interference term distorts the invariant mass distribution and generically leads to a non-trivial peak-dip structure. We study this process in a simplified model involving an additional scalar or pseudoscalar resonance as well as in the Two-Higgs-Doublet-Model for a set of representative benchmarks. We present the constraints on simplified models featuring an extra scalar as set by the LHC searches for top-anti-top resonances, and the implications of the 750 GeV diphoton excess recently reported by CMS and ATLAS for the top pair production assuming a scalar or a pseudoscalar resonance.