Probing anomalous $Wtb$ couplings at the LHC in single top quark production through $t$-channel

TL;DR

This paper investigates how certain asymmetries in top quark decay products can effectively detect anomalous $Wtb$ couplings at the LHC, demonstrating robustness against QCD corrections and providing projected limits.

Contribution

It introduces asymmetries based on decay product energies and angles as sensitive probes for anomalous $Wtb$ couplings, evaluated at LO and NLO in the $5$ flavor scheme.

Findings

Asymmetries are robust against higher order QCD corrections.

Projected limits on anomalous couplings are estimated at both parton and particle levels.

Asymmetries serve as effective experimental probes for anomalous $Wtb$ interactions.

Abstract

We study the sensitivity of certain observables to the anomalous right tensorial coupling in single top production at the LHC at $\sqrt{s}=13 \text{ TeV}$. The observables consist of asymmetries constructed from the energy and angles of the decay products of the top quark produced in single top production through $t$-channel. The computation is done at Leading Order (LO) and Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) in the strong coupling in the $5$ flavor scheme. We have estimated projected limits on the anomalous coupling, both at the parton level without cuts and at the particle level with cuts. We find that the asymmetries are robust with respect to the higher order QCD corrections and are indeed a very good probe of this anomalous coupling of the top. Hence they can be used as experimental probes of the same.