Monday, February 18, 2013

1302.3856 (John Campbell et al.)

Single top production in association with a Z boson at the LHC    [PDF]

John Campbell, R. Keith Ellis, Raoul Röntsch
We present results for the production of a Z boson in association with single top at next-to-leading order (NLO), including the decay of the top quark and the Z boson. This electroweak process gives rise to the trilepton signature l+l-l'+- + jets + missing energy. We present results for this signature and show that the rate is competitive with the contribution of the mixed strong and electroweak production process, $t\bar{t}Z$. As such it should be observable in the full data sample from LHC running at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV. The single top + Z process is a hitherto unconsidered irreducible background in searches for flavour changing neutral current decays of the top quark in $t \bar{t}$ production. For a selection of cuts used at the LHC involving a b-tag it is the dominant background. In an appendix we also briefly discuss the impact of NLO corrections on the related tH process.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.3856

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