Probing the time structure of the quark-gluon plasma with top quarks

Abstract

The tiny droplets of Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) created in high-energy nuclear collisions experience fast expansion and cooling with a lifetime of a few $\text{fm}/c$. Despite the information provided by probes such as jet quenching and quarkonium suppression, and the excellent description by hydrodynamical models, direct access to the time evolution of the system remains elusive. We point out that the study of hadronically-decaying $W$ bosons, notably in events with a top-antitop quark pair, can provide key novel insight, into the time structure of the QGP. This is because of a unique feature, namely a time delay between the moment of the collision and that when the $W$-boson decay products start interacting with the medium. Furthermore, the length of the time delay can be constrained by selecting specific reconstructed top-quark momenta.

arXiv commentv1: 5 pages and 5 figures, plus supplemental material. v2: Typos corrected, one reference added. v3: includes additional clarifications; version to be published in Phys.Rev.Lett

References in corpus (27)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• PYTHIA 6.2 Physics and Manual
• The anti-k_t jet clustering algorithm
• A Brief Introduction to PYTHIA 8.1
• FastJet user manual
• A general framework for implementing NLO calculations in shower Monte Carlo programs: the POWHEG BOX
• PDF4LHC recommendations for LHC Run II
• Successive Combination Jet Algorithm For Hadron Collisions
• A Positive-Weight Next-to-Leading-Order Monte Carlo for Heavy Flavour Hadroproduction
• Hydrodynamic Modeling of Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Extracting jet transport coefficient from jet quenching at RHIC and LHC
• Interleaved Parton Showers and Tuning Prospects
• WW scattering at the LHC
• New picture of jet quenching dictated by color coherence
• Jet physics in heavy-ion collisions
• Scale-invariant resonance tagging in multijet events and new physics in Higgs pair production
• Experimental overview on small collision systems at the LHC
• Energy versus centrality dependence of the jet quenching parameter $\hat{q}$ at RHIC and LHC: a new puzzle?
• Heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider: a review of the results from Run 1
• Study of jet quenching with Z+jet correlations in PbPb and pp collisions at sqrt(s[NN]) = 5.02 TeV
• Differential top-antitop cross-section measurements as a function of observables constructed from final-state particles using pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV in the ATLAS detector
• Search for low mass vector resonances decaying to quark-antiquark pairs in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV
• Observation of top quark production in proton-nucleus collisions
• Top-quark production in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at LHC energies and beyond
• First observations of beam losses due to bound-free pair production in a heavy-ion collider
• Heavy ions at the Future Circular Collider
• Identified high-$p_T$ spectra in Cu+Cu collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=200 GeV

Cited by in corpus (37)

• Heavy quarks and jets as probes of the QGP
• Analyzing N-point Energy Correlators Inside Jets with CMS Open Data
• Resolving the Scales of the Quark-Gluon Plasma with Energy Correlators
• Jet quenching as a probe of the initial stages in heavy-ion collisions
• Medium-induced gluon radiation with full resummation of multiple scatterings for realistic parton-medium interactions
• Strange fireball as an explanation of the muon excess in Auger data
• Jet broadening in dense inhomogeneous matter
• Overview of high-density QCD studies with the CMS experiment at the LHC
• Time reclustering for jet quenching studies
• Jet Broadening in Flowing Matter -- Resummation
• Medium induced gluon spectrum in dense inhomogeneous matter
• Mapping collinear in-medium parton splittings
• Quantum partonic transport in QCD matter
• Evidence for top quark production in nucleus-nucleus collisions
• Jet quenching in anisotropic flowing matter
• Medium-induced radiation with vacuum propagation in the pre-hydrodynamics phase
• The medium-modified $g\to c\bar{c}$ splitting function in the BDMPS-Z formalism
• Soft modifications to jet fragmentation in high energy proton-proton collisions
• Stairway to discovery: a report on the CMS programme of cross section measurements from millibarns to femtobarns
• Observation of $t\bar{t}$ production in the lepton+jets and dilepton channels in $p$+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=8.16$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• A systematic analysis of transverse momentum spectra of $J/\psi$ mesons in high energy collisions
• An Experiment for Electron-Hadron Scattering at the LHC
• Exploring the time axis within medium-modified jets
• Production and hadronic decays of Higgs bosons in heavy ion collisions
• Telescoping jet substructure
• Framing energetic top-quark pair production at the LHC
• Observation of top-quark pair production in lead-lead collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Results on TOP physics from CMS
• Perspectives in Small Systems : Heavy Quarks and HBT Radii
• Top Quark Mixed Hybrid Meson and the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• The Future of High-Energy Heavy-Ion Facilities
• Theory Vision talk at LHCP2018
• Brazilian Participation in the Next-Generation Collider Experiments
• Partonic transport model application to heavy flavor
• Road map to extracting medium properties: an overview
• Future heavy-ion facilities: FCC-AA
• TOP2017: Experimental Summary