Top quark physics in the Large Hadron Collider era

Russell, Michael (2017) Top quark physics in the Large Hadron Collider era. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

We explore various aspects of top quark phenomenology at the Large Hadron Collider and proposed future machines. After summarising the role of the top quark in the Standard Model (and some of its well-known extensions), we discuss the formulation of the Standard Model as a low energy effective theory. We isolate the sector of this effective theory that pertains to the top quark and that can be probed with top observables at hadron colliders, and present a global fit of this sector to currently available data from the LHC and Tevatron. Various directions for future improvement are sketched, including analysing the potential of boosted observables and future colliders, and we highlight the importance of using complementary information from different colliders. Interpretational issues related to the validity of the effective field theory formulation are elucidated throughout. Finally, we present an application of artificial neural network algorithms to identifying highly-boosted top quark events at the LHC, and comment on further refinements of our analysis that can be made.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: Q Science > QC Physics
• Colleges/Schools: College of Science and Engineering > School of Physics and Astronomy
• Supervisor's Name: White, Dr. Christopher
• Date of Award: 2017
• Depositing User: Mr Michael Russell
• Unique ID: glathesis:2017-8314
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 03 Oct 2017 08:08
• Last Modified: 17 Oct 2017 07:57
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/8314

Related URLs

• Enlighten Publications Record
• Article DOI
• Article DOI
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.02294
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08784
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.01782