Searching for anomalous top quark interactions with proton tagging and timing detectors at the LHC

Abstract

Abstract We study the LHC sensitivity to new broad neutral resonances produced in two-photon fusion and decaying to a top quark pair, γγ → $$ t\overline{t} $$ t t ¯ . This is probed in central exclusive $$ t\overline{t} $$ t t ¯ production in proton-proton collisions, pp → $$ pt\overline{t}p $$ pt t ¯ p . We use the tagging of the intact protons by PPS (CMS) and AFP (ATLAS) and consider the semi-leptonic $$ t\overline{t} $$ t t ¯ channel. The sensitivity is also mapped onto a set of dimension-8 $$ \gamma \gamma t\overline{t} $$ γγt t ¯ operators in the large mass limit. Using the kinematical correlations between the intact protons and the reconstructed $$ t\overline{t} $$ t t ¯ system, we obtain a sensitivity to the couplings of the dimension-8 operators of 1.4 10−11 GeV−4 at 95% CL. The sensitivity to the anomalous couplings is significantly improved down to about 7 10−12 GeV−4 if the proton time-of-flight is known with a precision of 20 ps in future measurements. The 95% CL sensitivity to broad neutral resonances reaches masses of order 1500 GeV when using timing information.