This Letter reports the observation of single top quarks produced together with a photon, which directly probes the electroweak coupling of the top quark. The analysis uses 139 fb$^{-1}$ of 13 TeV proton-proton collision data collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Requiring a photon with transverse momentum larger than 20 GeV and within the detector acceptance, the fiducial cross section is measured to be 688 $\pm$ 23 (stat.) $^{+75}_{-71}$ (syst.) fb, to be compared with the standard model prediction of 515 $^{+36}_{-42}$ fb at next-to-leading order in QCD.
This table shows the values for $\sigma_{tq\gamma}\times\mathcal{B}(t\rightarrow l\nu b)$ and $\sigma_{tq\gamma}\times\mathcal{B}(t\rightarrow l\nu b)+\sigma_{t(\rightarrow l\nu b\gamma)q}$ obtained by a profile-likelihood fit in the fiducial parton-level phase space (defined in Table 1) and particle-level phase space (defined in Table 2), respectively.
Distribution of the reconstructed top-quark mass in the $W\gamma\,$CR before the profile-likelihood fit. The "Total" column corresponds to the sum of the expected contributions from the signal and background processes. The uncertainty represents the sum of statistical and systematic uncertainties in the signal and background predictions. The first and last bins include the underflow and overflow, respectively.
Distribution of the NN output in the 0fj$\,$SR in data and the expected contribution of the signal and background processes after the profile-likelihood fit. The "Total" column corresponds to the sum of the expected contributions from the signal and background processes. The uncertainty represents the sum of statistical and systematic uncertainties in the signal and background predictions considering the correlations of the uncertainties as obtained by the fit.
The MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab reports a total excess of $638.0 \pm 132.8$ electron-like events ($4.8 \sigma$) from a data sample corresponding to $18.75 \times 10^{20}$ protons-on-target in neutrino mode, which is a 46\% increase in the data sample with respect to previously published results, and $11.27 \times 10^{20}$ protons-on-target in antineutrino mode. The additional statistics allow several studies to address questions on the source of the excess. First, we provide two-dimensional plots in visible energy and cosine of the angle of the outgoing lepton, which can provide valuable input to models for the event excess. Second, we test whether the excess may arise from photons that enter the detector from external events or photons exiting the detector from $\pi^0$ decays in two model independent ways. Beam timing information shows that almost all of the excess is in time with neutrinos that interact in the detector. The radius distribution shows that the excess is distributed throughout the volume, while tighter cuts on the fiducal volume increase the significance of the excess. We conclude that models of the event excess based on entering and exiting photons are disfavored.
The frequentist $1\sigma$ confidence region in $\sin^2(2\theta)$ $\Delta m^2$ for a 2-neutrino muon-to-electron oscillation fit.
The frequentist $90\%$ confidence region in $\sin^2(2\theta)$ $\Delta m^2$ for a 2-neutrino muon-to-electron oscillation fit.
The frequentist $99\%$ confidence region in $\sin^2(2\theta)$ $\Delta m^2$ for a 2-neutrino muon-to-electron oscillation fit.