TOP2017: Experimental Summary

TL;DR

The TOP2017 summary highlights advancements in top quark physics driven by large LHC datasets, exploring new processes and experimental settings, and addressing systematic uncertainties in measurements.

Contribution

This paper provides an experimental overview of recent top quark physics results from TOP2017, emphasizing new processes, diverse collision environments, and the impact of large data samples.

Findings

First measurements of new top quark processes

Exploration of top quark production in heavy ion collisions

Addressing the systematic uncertainties in top quark analyses

Abstract

At the time of the 10th International Workshop on Top Quark Physics (TOP2017), top quark physics is a very dynamic research area. Thanks to the unprecedentedly fast accumulation of high-energy data at the LHC during the ongoing Run~2, statistical starvation is a matter of the past for most of the traditional top-quark analyses, that are now experiencing the luxury of having to worry about how to punch through the "Systematics Wall" and maximize the utility of their data. New processes involving top quarks are being studied for the first time, and the good old pair-production processes are being explored in unusual settings, such as collisions involving heavy ions, or "reference data" collected by the LHC at relatively low centre-of-mass energy. The TOP2017 conference featured 37 talks delivered by experimental physicists, including seven in the "Young Scientists Forum" where young colleagues were given the opportunity to elaborate more deeply than usual on their own work. As it is impossible to do justice to all the experimental results presented at this conference while staying within a reasonable length, this document contains a very biased selection, mostly based on the personal taste of the author.