Search for central exclusive production of top quark pairs in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV with tagged protons

Author:

CMS, TOTEM Collaborations

Keyword:

High Energy Physics - Experiment, High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex)

journal:

CMS-TOP-21-007, TOTEM 2023-002, CERN-EP-2023-113

date:

2023-10-16 16:00:00

Abstract

A search for the central exclusive production of top quark-antiquark pairs ($\mathrm{t\bar{t}}$) is performed for the first time using proton-tagged events in proton-proton collisions at the LHC at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 29.4 fb$^{-1}$. The $\mathrm{t\bar{t}}$ decay products are reconstructed using the central CMS detector, while forward protons are measured in the CMS-TOTEM precision proton spectrometer. An observed (expected) upper bound on the production cross section of 0.59 (1.14) pb is set at 95% confidence level, for collisions of protons with fractional momentum losses between 2 and 20%.

PDF: Search for central exclusive production of top quark pairs in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV with tagged protons.pdf