Observation of an excess at the top quark pair production threshold in the single-lepton channel

Abstract

A search is presented for top quark-antiquark ($\mathrm{t\bar{t}}$) quasi-bound ``toponium'' states, near the kinematic $\mathrm{t\bar{t}}$ production threshold in final states with a single electron or muon and jets. The study uses proton-proton collision data at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV, collected by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$^{-1}$. The analysis examines the relative velocity between the top quark and antiquark, along with two angular observables sensitive to the parity and spin of the $\mathrm{t\bar{t}}$ system. A significant excess of events is observed relative to the standard model prediction for $\mathrm{t\bar{t}}$ production calculated at next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The excess corresponds to an observed total cross section of 5.1$\pm$0.9 pb and is consistent with a simplified model of a color singlet pseudoscalar toponium motivated by nonrelativistic QCD, with a resulting observed significance of 6.1 standard deviations. The result provides an independent confirmation of the excess reported in the dilepton channel.