Differential distributions for Single Top Quark Production at the LHeC

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed NLO QCD analysis of single top quark production at the LHeC, including differential distributions, scale uncertainties, and a novel method for top-quark mass determination.

Contribution

It offers the first NLO QCD predictions for differential distributions in single top production at the LHeC and introduces a new approach to measure the top-quark mass using lepton transverse momentum.

Findings

NLO corrections reduce the fiducial cross section by 14%

NLO predictions are stable under scale variations for most observables

The proposed top-quark mass measurement has a theoretical uncertainty of 1.3 GeV and a statistical error of 1.1 GeV

Abstract

We present a phenomenological study of the single top (anti-)quark production with leptonic decays at the Large Hadron electron Collider (LHeC) at the next-to-leading-order (NLO) in QCD. We focus on various differential distributions in a fiducial region. The NLO corrections can reduce the fiducial cross section by 14%. We find the NLO predictions exhibit strong stability under scale variations for most observables considered while the scale variations at the leading-order (LO) dominated in the theoretical uncertainties. We propose a method of determining the top-quark mass using the measurement of the average transverse momentum of the charged lepton. The scale variations at the NLO induce a theoretical uncertainty of about 1.3 GeV of the extracted top-quark mass. The statistical error of the extracted top-quark mass amounts to 1.1 GeV. We also investigate the impact of the QCD corrections and the scale variations in searches of the anomalous Wtb couplings.