A search for the electroweak production of a vector-like quark T$'$, decaying to a top quark and a Higgs boson is presented. The search is based on a sample of proton-proton collision events recorded at the LHC at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$^{-1}$. This is the first T$'$ search that exploits the Higgs boson decay to a pair of photons. For narrow isospin singlet T$'$ states with masses up to 1.1 TeV, the excellent diphoton invariant mass resolution of 1-2% results in an increased sensitivity compared to previous searches based on the same production mechanism. The electroweak production of a T$'$ quark with mass up to 960 GeV is excluded at 95% confidence level, assuming a coupling strength $\kappa_\mathrm{T}$ = 0.25 and a relative decay width $\Gamma/M_{\mathrm{T}'}$ $\lt$ 5%.
The combined, leptonic plus hadronic, expected (dotted black) and observed (solid black) upper limits at 95% CL on $\sigma_{T^\prime bq} \times \mathcal{B}_{T^\prime \rightarrow tH}$ displayed as a function of $\rm{M}_{T^\prime}$. The green (yellow) band represents the 68% (95%) of the limit values expected under the background-only hypothesis. The theoretical cross sections for the singlet $T^\prime$ production with representative $\kappa_T$-values fixed at 0.1, 0.15, 0.2 and 0.25 (for $\Gamma/\rm{M}_{T^\prime} < 5\%$) are shown as solid red lines. The theoretical cross sections for the singlet $T^\prime$ production with $\Gamma/\rm{M}_{T^\prime}$ = 1 and 5% are also shown in table.
The combined, leptonic plus hadronic, expected (dotted black) and observed (solid black) upper limits at 95% CL on the $T^\prime$ coupling to third-generation quarks, $\kappa_{T}$, under the narrow width approximation (NWA) displayed as a function of $\rm{M}_{T^\prime}$. The green (yellow) band represents the 68% (95%) of the limit values expected under the background-only hypothesis. The theoretical $\kappa_{T}$ values corresponding to the $\Gamma/\rm{M}_{T^\prime}$-values fixed at 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5% are shown as red dashed lines.
The expected (dotted black) and observed (solid black) upper limits at 95% CL on $\sigma_{T^\prime bq(T^\prime \rightarrow tH)}$ in the leptonic channel displayed as a function of $\rm{M}_{T^\prime}$. The green (yellow) band represents the 68% (95%) of the limit values expected under the background-only hypothesis. The theoretical cross sections for the singlet $T^\prime$ production with representative $\kappa_T$-values fixed at 0.1, 0.15, 0.2 and 0.25 (for $\Gamma/\rm{M}_{T^\prime} < 5\%$) are shown as solid red lines.
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