Abstract
The first observation of top quark production in proton-nucleus collisions is reported using proton-lead data collected by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC at a nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of . The measurement is performed using events with exactly one isolated electron or muon candidate and at least four jets. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of . The significance of the signal against the background-only hypothesis is above 5 standard deviations. The measured cross section is , consistent with predictions from perturbative quantum chromodynamics.
- Received 21 September 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.242001
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
© 2017 CERN, for the CMS Collaboration
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Synopsis
Top Quark in Nuclear Collisions
Published 14 December 2017
The top quark—previously seen in proton collisions—has now been identified in collisions between protons and lead nuclei.
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