Statistical Indications of Toponium Formation in Top Quark Pair Production

TL;DR

This paper analyzes top-quark pair production data from ATLAS and CMS, providing strong statistical evidence for the formation of toponium states, a bound state of top quarks, in high-energy collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel statistical approach to detect toponium formation effects in top-quark pair production data using Green's function re-weighting and Bayesian analysis.

Findings

Bayes factors > 1 for all observables

Two observables have Bayes factors > 20

Strong evidence for toponium formation at the LHC

Abstract

We present an analysis of six differential cross-section measurements of top-quark pair production in the dilepton channel from the ATLAS and CMS experiments. The data are compared to state-of-the-art QCD predictions with and without the inclusion of toponium formation effects. This contribution is modelled via a re-weighting of fixed-order matrix elements using the Green's function of the non-relativistic QCD Hamiltonian, and we employ a statistical model to quantify the preference of the data for the toponium hypothesis. All observables yield Bayes factors larger than unity, with two exceeding 20, yielding strong evidence for the toponium hypothesis in top-quark pair production at the LHC.