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arXiv · 2302.04188

NLO QCD corrections to off-shell top-antitop production with semi-leptonic decays at lepton colliders

Abstract

The study of top-quark properties will be a central aspect of the physics programme of any future lepton collider. In this article, we investigate the production of top-quark pairs in the semi-leptonic decay channel in $\rm e^+e^-$ collisions, whose experimental signature is one charged lepton, jets, and missing energy. We present for the first time fiducial cross sections and differential distributions at next-to-leading-order accuracy in QCD for the full off-shell process. We find that the QCD corrections for the considered process are strongly dependent on the beam energies and range from few per cent up to more than $100\%$ (near threshold and above 1 TeV). We focus, in particular, on two scenarios: one close to threshold (365 GeV), dominated by top-pair production, and one at the TeV scale (1.5 TeV), for which irreducible-background contributions become relevant. An assessment of polarised-beam effects is also provided.

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BibTeXRIS

Ansgar Denner, Mathieu Pellen, Giovanni Pelliccioli. 2023-02-08. NLO QCD corrections to off-shell top-antitop production with semi-leptonic decays at lepton colliders. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-023-11500-3

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