Rare exclusive hadronic W decays in a t-tbar environment

Abstract

The large cross section for t-tbar production at the LHC and at any future hadron collider provides a high-statistics and relatively clean environment for a study of W boson properties: after tagging on a leptonic decay of one of the Ws and the two b-jets, an additional W still remains in the event. We study the prospect of making the first exclusive hadronic decay of a fundamental boson of the standard model, using the decay modes W to pi gamma and W to pi pi pi, and other related decays. By using strong isolation criteria, which we impose by searching for jets with a single particle constituent, we show that the three particle hadronic W decays have potential to be measured at the LHC. The possibility of measuring an involved spectrum of decay products could considerably expand our knowledge of how the W decays, and experimental techniques acquired in making these measurements would be useful for application to future measurements of exclusive hadronic Higgs boson decays.