No Arabic abstract
A summary is presented of the workshop top physics at linear colliders that was held at IFIC Valencia from the 30th of June to the 3rd July 2015. We present an up-to-date status report of studies into the potential for top quark physics of lepton colliders with an energy reach that exceeds the top quark pair production threshold, with a focus on the linear collider projects ILC and CLIC. This summary shows that such projects can offer very competitive determinations of top quark properties (mass, width) and its interactions with other Standard Model particles, in particular electroweak gauge bosons and the Higgs boson. In both areas the prospects exceed the LHC potential significantly - often by an order of magnitude.
We review some recent developments in top quark production and decay at current and future colliders.
An overview is given of the potential for neutrino physics studies through parasitic use of the intense high energy neutrino beams that would be produced at future many-TeV muon colliders. Neutrino experiments clearly cannot compete with the collider physics. Except at the very highest energy muon colliders, the main thrust of the neutrino physics program would be to improve on the measurements from preceding neutrino experiments at lower energy muon colliders, particularly in the fields of B physics, quark mixing and CP violation. Muon colliders at the 10 TeV energy scale might already produce of order 10^8 B hadrons per year in a favorable and unique enough experimental environment to have some analytical capabilities beyond any of the currently operating or proposed B factories. The most important of the quark mixing measurements at these energies might well be the improved measurements of the important CKM matrix elements |V_ub| and |V_cb| and, possibly, the first measurements of |V_td| in the process of flavor changing neutral current interactions involving a top quark loop. Muon colliders at the highest center-of-mass energies that have been conjectured, 100--1000 TeV, would produce neutrino beams for neutrino-nucleon interaction experiments with maximum center-of-mass energies from 300--1000 GeV. Such energies are comparable to the 314 GeV center-of-mass energy for electron-proton scattering at the HERA collider, but the luminosity would would be several orders of magnitude larger. This would potentially open up the possibility for high statistics studies of any exotic particles, such as leptoquarks, that might have been previously discovered at these energy scales.
In composite Higgs (CH) models, large mixings between the top quark and the new strongly interacting sector are required to generate its sizeable Yukawa coupling. Precise measurements involving top as well as left-handed bottom quarks therefore offer an interesting opportunity to probe such new physics scenarios. We study the impact of third-generation-quark pair production at future lepton colliders, translating prospective effective-field-theory sensitivities into the CH parameter space. Our results show that one can probe a significant fraction of the natural CH parameter space through the top portal, especially at TeV centre-of-mass energies.
In hadronic collisions at high energies, the top-quark may be treated as a parton inside a hadron. Top-quark initiated processes become increasingly important since the top-quark luminosity can reach a few percent of the bottom-quark luminosity. In the production of a heavy particle $H$ with mass $m_H > m_t$, treating the top-quark as a parton allows us to resum large logarithms $log(m_{H}^{2}/m_{t}^{2}$) arising from collinear splitting in the initial state. We quantify the effect of collinear resummation at the 14-TeV LHC and a future 100-TeV hadron collider, focusing on the top-quark open-flavor process $ggto tbar t H$ in comparison with $tbar t to H$ and $tgrightarrow tH$ at the leading order (LO) in QCD. We employ top-quark parton distribution functions with appropriate collinear subtraction and power counting. We find that (1) Collinear resummation enhances the inclusive production of a heavy particle with $m_Happrox$ 5 TeV (0.5 TeV) by more than a factor of two compared to the open-flavor process at a 100-TeV (14-TeV) collider; (2) Top-quark mass effects are important for scales $m_H$ near the top-quark threshold, where the cross section is largest. We advocate a modification of the ACOT factorization scheme, dubbed m-ACOT, to consistently treat heavy-quark masses in hadronic collisions; (3) The scale uncertainty of the total cross section in m-ACOT is of about 20 percent at the LO. While a higher-order calculation is indispensable for a precise prediction, the LO cross section is well described by the process $tbar tto H$ using an effective factorization scale significantly lower than $m_H$. We illustrate our results by the example of a heavy spin-0 particle. Our main results also apply to the production of particles with spin-1 and 2.
Recent experimental results of searches for new phenomena performed at high energy colliders are reviewed. The results reported are based on data samples of up to 1 fb^-1 and 4 fb^-1 collected at HERA and at the Tevatron, respectively. No significant evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model has been found and limits at the 95% confidence level have been set on the mass and couplings of several possible new particles.