Elastic Potential: A proposal to discover elastic production of top quarks at the Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to detect elastic top-quark pair production at the LHC using forward proton tags, demonstrating potential for early discovery and setting new limits on rare top quark decays.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis approach for elastic top-quark production at the LHC with forward proton tagging, highlighting the feasibility of early detection and improved decay limits.

Findings

Semi-elastic top-quark production detectable with 300 pb^{-1} of data.

Fully-elastic production currently beyond reach.

Potential to set new limits on flavor-changing neutral current decays.

Abstract

In this letter, I present the motivation and an example analysis method for discovering the elastic production of top-quark pairs at the LHC using forward proton tags, including an overview of the current theoretical tools and experimental acceptance. I show that it is possible to discover the semi-elastic process with only 300 pb${^{-1}}$ of data but that the fully-elastic case is currently out of reach. I also illustrate how the use of forward proton tags can result in limits on the branching ratio for flavor changing neutral current decays of the top quark of the form $t\rightarrow u\gamma$ and $t\rightarrow c\gamma$ of $<0.39\cdot10^{-5}$ and $<0.97\cdot10^{-5}$, respectively, both of which would surpass the existing world limits by at least an order of magnitude.