Top Quark Physics: a Perspective to 2020

by Dr Lucio Cerrito (Queen Mary University of London)

Thursday 26 Feb 2015, 08:00 → 09:30 Europe/Rome

131 (INFN edificio C)

 The discovery of the top quark 20 years ago set the beginning of a comprehensive study of its properties and dynamics both at the Tevatron collider in the USA, and more recently at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The decay of the top as a free quark, but particularly its large mass of ~173 GeV/c² make it still today a special case amongst the fundamental particles.

Today, cosmological observations and theoretical arguments lead us to believe that new phenomenology, new particles, forces, or even a new space-time structure is waiting to be uncovered. Naturalness of the recently discovered Higgs boson suggests that new phenomena should appear at the TeV scale, and in most models these will be accompanied by modifications to the dynamics of the top quark.

In this talk, I will discuss the basic phenomenology of top quarks, the experimental challenges, and the state of the art for the main observables from ATLAS and CDF. I will also present in some detail five key measurements that will be performed with the LHC Run II data by 2020.

 

Slides seminar_cerrito_pisa.pdf