Postdoc interview seminar CMS-VUB: Single top quark production at the CMS experiment: from precision measurement to search for rare production modes

by Ms Denise Müller

Thursday 9 Jan 2020, 13:30 → 14:15 Europe/Brussels

Jean Sacton Seminar room (1G003) (IIHE (ULB-VUB))

abstract: Top quarks play a special role in the standard model of particle physics as they are the heaviest elementary particles and decay before they can form bound states with other particles. One possible top quark production mode are single top quark processes, which enable detailed studies of the electroweak sector of the standard model. These studies comprise precision measurements of top quark properties as well as searches for small deviations from the standard model, which could hint to new physics. In this talk, I will present two different single top quark analyses, carried out with data measured by the CMS detector at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The first part is dedicated to the cross section measurement of the most dominant production mode, the $t$-channel process, which provides an insight into the inner structure of the proton and allows a direct measurement of the CKM matrix element $V_tb$. In the second part of the talk, I will focus on the search of a rare production mode, the $s$-channel process, which has not been observed so far at the LHC. This process could be sensitive to multiple new physics scenarios.