Measurement of Top Quark Polarisation in T-Channel Single Top Quark Production

The CMS collaboration Khachatryan, Vardan ; Sirunyan, Albert M ; Tumasyan, Armen ; et al.
JHEP 04 (2016) 073, 2016.
Inspire Record 1403169 DOI 10.17182/hepdata.38092

A first measurement of the top quark spin asymmetry, sensitive to the top quark polarisation, in t-channel single top quark production is presented. It is based on a sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 inverse-femtobarns. A high-purity sample of t-channel single top quark events with an isolated muon is selected. Signal and background components are estimated using a fit to data. A differential cross section measurement, corrected for detector effects, of an angular observable sensitive to the top quark polarisation is performed. The differential distribution is used to extract a top quark spin asymmetry of 0.26 +/- 0.03 (stat) +/- 0.10 (syst), which is compatible with a p-value of 4.6% with the standard model prediction of 0.44.

1 data table match query

The asymmetry $A_{\mu}$ extracted from the differential cross sections.