Top-quark and Higgs boson perspectives at heavy-ion colliders

Abstract

The perspectives for measuring the top quark and the Higgs boson in nuclear collisions at the LHC and Future Circular Collider (FCC) are summarized. Perturbative QCD calculations at (N)NLO accuracy, including nuclear parton distribution functions, are used to determine their cross sections and visible yields after standard analysis cuts in PbPb and pPb collisions at the LHC ($\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.5, 8.8 TeV) and FCC ($\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 39, 63 TeV). In their "cleanest" decay channels, $\mathrm{t}\bar{\mathrm{t}}\to \mathrm{b}\bar{\mathrm{b}}2\mathrm{\ell }2\nu$ and $\mathrm{H}\to \gamma \gamma ,4\mathrm{\ell }$, about 10${}^3$ ($10^5$) top-quark and 10 (10${}^3$) Higgs-boson events are expected at the LHC (FCC) for their total nominal integrated luminosities. Whereas the $\mathrm{t}\bar{\mathrm{t}}$ observation is clearcut at both colliders, evidence for Higgs production, perfectly possible at the FCC, requires integrating $\times$30 more luminosities at the LHC.

4 pages. 3 figures. Proceedings Hard-Probes'16, to appear in 'Nuclear and Particle Physics Proceedings'

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• New parton distributions for collider physics
• Higgs boson gluon-fusion production in N3LO QCD
• Top-quark production in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at LHC energies and beyond