Top-quark mass determination from t-channel single top production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates a method to determine the top-quark mass at the LHC using leptonic observables in t-channel single top production, achieving a theoretical uncertainty of about 1-2 GeV.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using charge-weighted leptonic distributions and provides NNLO QCD predictions for top-quark mass extraction.

Findings

Sensitivity of lepton transverse momentum to top-quark mass

Projected uncertainty of 1-2 GeV at HL-LHC

Use of charge asymmetry to reduce background impact

Abstract

We study the determination of the top-quark mass using leptonic observables in t-channel single top-quark production at the LHC. We demonstrate sensitivity of transverse momentum of the charged lepton on the input top-quark mass. We present predictions at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD with narrow width approximation and structure function approach. Further corrections due to parton shower and hadronization, non-resonant and non-factorized contributions are discussed. To reduce impact of SM backgrounds we propose to use the charge weighted distribution for the measurement, i.e., differences between distributions of charged lepton with positive and negative charges. By modeling both signal and background processes, we found the projections for (HL-)LHC to be promising, with a total theoretical uncertainty on the extracted top-quark mass of about 1 $\sim$ 2 GeV.