Abstract. The search for tt resonances allows the investigation of a wide range of physics beyond the Standard Model. For a high mass resonance, the top quark is produced with a transverse momentum that is large, compared to its mass, and the decay of such a highly boosted top often leads to a topology that di↵ers in several respects from that encountered when the top quarks are produced approximately at rest. The search is performed with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC using an integrated luminosity of 14 fb 1 of proton-proton collisions data collected at center-of-mass energy p s = 8 TeV. No evidence for a tt resonance is found and 95% CL limits on the production rate are determined for massive states in two benchmark models. A narrow leptophobic topcolor Z' boson with a mass below 1.8 TeV is excluded and a Kaluza-Klein excitation of the gluon in a Randall-Sundrum model is excluded for masses below 2.0 TeV.
IntroductionThis note reports on an ATLAS experiment [1] search for the production of top quark pair resonances, such as a leptophobic Z' or a Kaluza-Klein gluon, produced in protonproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV using data collected in 2012 with an integrated luminosity of 14.3 fb 1 [2]. This search is carried out in the lepton plus jets decay channel, where one of the W bosons from a top quark decays leptonically (to an electron or a muon and a neutrino) and the other decays hadronically. The tt invariant mass spectrum is tested for any local excess of events that may stem from a resonance decaying into tt. The events are reconstructed using a combination of resolved and boosted reconstruction methods. In the former, the hadronically decaying top quark is identified by two or three distinct small-radius jets. In the latter, the hadronically decaying top quark is identified by reconstructing one large-radius jet with a substructure consistent with the decay products of a W boson and a b quark. High momentum top quark decays are indeed reconstructed more e ciently using boosted reconstruction techniques. For both reconstruction methods, the semileptonically decaying top quark is identified by a lepton, one small-radius jet and missing transverse momentum.Both ATLAS [2] and CMS [3] have used two specific theoretical models as benchmarks to test the production of narrow and broad resonances as compared to the detector resolution, which is of the order of 7%. The narrow resonance benchmark is a topcolor, leptophobic Z' given by model IV of Harris et al. [4] with a width of a e-mail: dechenaux@lpsc.in2p3.fr Z 0 /m Z 0 = 1.2%. The broad resonance benchmark is related to Kaluza-Klein (KK) excitation states of the gluon as predicted in Randall-Sundrum models with a warped extra-dimension and where all the standard model fields can propagate in the five dimensions. A resonance width of g KK /m g KK = 15.3% is used. Details on the tested models can be found in previous ATLAS studies [5].
Data and Monte Carlo samplesOnly data recorded under stable beam conditions and operationnal ATLAS subdetect...