T-odd Asymmetry in W+jet Events at the LHC
Abstract
W bosons produced at high transverse momentum in hadron collisions can have polarization along the direction perpendicular to the production plane, which is odd under nave-T-reversal where both the three-momenta and angular momenta are reversed. Perturbative QCD predicts non-zero polarization at the one-loop level, which can be measured as parity-odd components in the angular distribution of charged leptons from the decay of W bosons. We perform a detector-level simulation with the generator MadGraph5aMC@NLO, and demonstrate that the asymmetry can be observed at the 8 TeV LHC with 20 fb-1 of data. If confirmed, it will be the first experimental measurement of the sign of the imaginary part of one-loop QCD amplitudes.
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