Future Top Quark Pole Mass Improvements from PDF Updates

TL;DR

This paper investigates how updates to parton distribution functions (PDFs) can improve the precision of top-quark pole mass measurements at current and future colliders by analyzing differential mass distributions and reducing PDF uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate PDF updates into top-quark mass measurements, enhancing accuracy through differential distribution fits at the LHC and future colliders.

Findings

PDF uncertainties can be significantly reduced with updated PDFs.

Differential mass distributions improve top-quark mass precision.

Future colliders will benefit from refined PDF-based measurements.

Abstract

The dependence of the top-quark mass measurement in top-quark pair production on the parton distribution functions (PDF) is explored through differential mass distributions in $t\bar{t}$ and $t\bar{t}j$ production at the LHC and a future 100 TeV proton-proton collider. The top-quark mass uncertainty is obtained from chi-squared fits to invariant mass distributions from simulations assuming different top pole masses around the nominal value of 172.5 GeV. The PDF uncertainties of the differential distributions are used in the chi-square evaluation and reduced through a fit to differential distributions in $t\bar{t}$ and $t\bar{t}j$ production.