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

Overview

Abstract; A search for the central exclusive production of top quark-antiquark pairs ($$ textrm{t}overline{textrm{t}} $$; t; ; 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 $$ textrm{t}overline{textrm{t}} $$; t; ; 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%.

Tumasyan A; Adam W; Andrejkovic JW; Bergauer T; Chatterjee S; Damanakis K; Dragicevic M; Escalante Del Valle A; Hussain PS; Jeitler M