Discovering and profiling Z' bosons using asymmetry observables in top quark pair production with the lepton-plus-jets final state at the LHC

Abstract

The sensitivity of top quark pair production at the Large Hadron Collider to the presence and nature of an underlying Z' boson is studied, accounting for six-fermion decay with full tree-level Standard Model ttbar interference and all intermediate particles allowed off-shell. Focus is placed on the lepton-plus-jets final state, emulating experimental conditions, including kinematic requirements and top quark pair reconstruction in the presence of missing transverse energy and combinatorial ambiguity in jet-top assignment. Considering a resonance with mass of 4 TeV, and assuming 300 inverse fb of proton-proton collisions with a centre of mass energy of 13 TeV data, a combination of forward-backward and top polarisation asymmetries are shown to distinguish Z' embedded by different classes of Grand-Unified-Theory-inspired models. In combination with the differential cross section, they may be used to increase the significance of the signal when tested against the Standard Model, as shown using a likelihood-based statistical test.