Probing top quark FCNC couplings in the triple-top signal at the high energy LHC and future circular collider

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to detect top quark flavor changing neutral current interactions via triple-top production at future high-energy colliders, providing improved sensitivity limits over current experiments.

Contribution

It presents a detailed analysis of FCNC couplings in triple-top signals at HE-LHC and FCC-hh, offering new sensitivity limits and comparison with existing experimental results.

Findings

Limits on FCNC couplings are significantly improved at higher energies.

Branching ratio sensitivities reach three orders of magnitude better than current limits.

Triple-top production provides a promising channel for probing top quark FCNC interactions.

Abstract

Our main aim in this paper is to present detailed studies to probe the top quark flavor changing neutral current (FCNC) interactions at $tqg$, $tq\gamma$, $tqH$ and $tqZ (\sigma^{\mu \nu}, \gamma_{\mu})$ vertices in the triple-top signal $p p \to t \bar t t \, (\bar t t \bar t)$ at the high energy proposal of Large Hadron Collider (HE-LHC) and future circular hadron-hadron collider (FCC-hh). To this end, we investigate the production of three top quarks which arises from the FCNC couplings taken into account the fast simulation at $\sqrt{s} = 27$ TeV of HE-LHC and 100 TeV of FCC-hh considering the integrated luminosities of 10, 15 and 20 ab$^{-1}$. All the relevant backgrounds are considered in a cut based analysis to obtain the limits on the anomalous couplings and the corresponding branching ratios. The obtained exclusion limits on the coupling strengths and the branching ratios are summarized and compared in details with the results in the literature, namely the most recent direct LHC experimental limits and HL-LHC projections as well. We show that, for higher energy phase of LHC, a dedicated search for the top quark FCNC couplings can achieve much better sensitivities to the triple-top signal than other top quark production scenarios. We found that the limits for the branching ratios of $tqg$ and $tqH$ transitions could reach an impressive sensitivity and the obtained 95\% CL limits are at least three orders of magnitude better than the current LHC experimental results as well as the existing projections of HL-LHC.