Search for new physics in associated top quark production in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV within the framework of effective field theory
Andrew Wightman, Graduate Student
University of Notre Dame
Over the next few years the planned upgrades to the LHC won't see a significant increase to the collision energy of the beams, but will see a huge increase in the number of recorded events. This opens the door to techniques which can make use of these large datasets. In particular, I will talk about how an effective field theory (EFT) framework can be used as a probe for new physics. I will discuss the recent results of a CMS analysis looking at data collected in 2017 to search for new physics. These results include 16 dimension-6 EFT operators that can affect associated top quark production, along with a novel approach in which the observed yields are parameterized in terms of the Wilson coefficients (WCs) of the EFT operators. A simultaneous fit of the 16 WCs to the data is performed to extract the two standard deviation confidence intervals for the WCs.