Model-independent sensitivity estimates for the electromagnetic dipole moments of the top quark at the Large Hadron Collider and beyond

TL;DR

This paper estimates the sensitivity of the Large Hadron Collider and future colliders to the electromagnetic dipole moments of the top quark by analyzing anomalous interactions in single top production, providing improved limits on these couplings.

Contribution

It introduces a model-independent method to set sensitivity limits on top quark electromagnetic dipole moments at current and future colliders using single top production processes.

Findings

Best limits on anomalous couplings at HE-LHC with 15 ab$^{-1}$ luminosity.

HE-LHC improves sensitivity limits compared to previous studies.

Sensitivity to top quark dipole moments is enhanced at future collider energies.

Abstract

As the heaviest known fundamental particle, the top quark ensures testing of the Standard Model and occupies a significant role in a lot of theories of new physics beyond the Standard Model. Up to now, the top quark has been only generated at the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. However, one of the most important tasks of the physics program at the Large Hadron Collider is the investigation of the anomalous top quark interactions. In addition, the production of single top quarks, though rarer than production in pairs, presents us a different way to study the top quark produced via the electroweak interaction. This makes single top quark production an important signature for studying the properties of the top quark. Hence, we examine the anomalous $t\bar{t}\gamma$ interactions to investigate limits on the anomalous $a_A$ and $a_V$ couplings through single top quark production of the process $pp\rightarrow p \gamma^{*} p \rightarrow p t W X$ at the Large Hadron Collider, the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider and High Energy Large Hadron Collider. The best limits obtained on the anomalous $a_A$ and $a_V$ couplings through the subprocess $\gamma^{*} b \rightarrow W t$ at the High Energy Large Hadron Collider with $L_{int}=15$ ab$^{-1}$ at $68\%$ Confidence Level are found to be $|a_{A}|=0.0590$ and $a_{V}=[-0.3202;0.0108]$. Therefore, we understand that $\gamma^{*} p$ collisions at the High Energy Large Hadron Collider improves the sensitivity limits of the anomalous coupling parameters according to previous studies.