Charge asymmetry of top quarks

Abstract

The LHC is a promising machine to discover new physics in the top sector. There are several models that predict the existence of heavy colored resonances decaying to top quarks in the TeV energy range. The production of such resonances might generate a sizable charge asymmetry of top versus antitop quarks. At the Tevatron, a 2 σ discrepancy with the SM prediction for the forward-backward asymmetry has been found, boosting a renewed interest for this kind of models. We consider a toy model with general flavour dependent couplings of the resonance to quarks, of both vector and axial-vector kind and investigate the possible constraints on the coupling space from the measurement of the asymmetry and the invariant mass distribution at the Tevatron. Then, we define a central asymmetry in a specific kinematic region and investigate its signature at the LHC as well as its statistical significance, for exclusive processes. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.