Precise determination of the top-quark pole mass from the $tbar{t}$ production cross-section at the LHC


Abstract in English

The top-quark is the heaviest known particle of the Standard Model (SM); its heavy mass plays a crucial role in testing the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism and for searching for new physics beyond the SM. In this paper, we determine the top-quark pole mass from recent measurements at the LHC at $sqrt{S}=13$ TeV center-of-mass energy to high precision by applying the Principle of Maximum Conformality (PMC) to the $tbar{t}$ pQCD production cross-section at NNLO. The PMC provides a systematic method which rigorously eliminates QCD renormalization scale ambiguities by summing the nonconformal $beta$ contributions into the QCD coupling constant. The PMC predictions satisfy the requirements of renormalization group invariance, including renormalization scheme independence, and the PMC scales accurately reflect the virtuality of the underlying production subprocesses. By using the PMC, an improved prediction for the $tbar{t}$ production cross-section is obtained without scale ambiguities, which in turn provides a precise value for the top-quark pole mass. The resulting determination of the top-quark pole mass $m_t^{rm pole}=172.5pm1.2$ GeV from the LHC measurement at $sqrt{S}=13$ TeV is in agreement with the current world average cited by the Particle Data Group (PDG). The PMC prediction provides an important high-precision test of the consistency of pQCD and the SM at $sqrt{S}=13$ TeV with previous LHC measurements at lower CM energies.

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