ANALYSIS OF MONTE CARLO SIMULATIONS FOR A BOOSTED TOP QUARK MASS MEASUREMENT AT THE HIGH-ENERGY FRONTIER

One possible successor of the Large Hadron Collider could be the High-Energy LHC (HE-LHC) with a collision energy reaching up to 27 TeV[1]. At this energy large numbers of top (anti)quarks would be produced at high velocity. The aim of the project is to test a method for highly boosted top quark mass measurements on Monte Carlo simulation data. Investigating top quarks with very large transverse momenta requires a different approach than for top quarks with smaller transverse momenta, since the top quark hadronic decay final state usually merges into a single jet. More precisely, top quark decay products are reconstructed using a single jet with distance parameter R=1.2 constructed with the Cambridge–Aachen clustering algorithm (further referred to as CA12). Event analysis is performed in the lepton+jets channel. One leading jet is selected, which is assumed to come from the top quark hadronic decay (t->bW->bqq’) and should consist of all particles from the top quark decay products. Therefore the leading jet invariant mass should correspond to the invariant mass of the top quark. Also, one next-to leading jet is selected, which is assumed to come from top quark leptonic decay (t->bW->blν¯). The invariant mass of the sum between the next-to leading jet and the reconstructed neutrino corresponds to the other top quark as invariant mass from a tt¯ event. Selection requirements for the events were inspired by article [2].