Measurement of the differential cross-section of highly boosted top quarks as a function of their transverse momentum in \(\sqrt{s}\) = 8 TeV proton-proton collisions using the ATLAS detector

Abstract

The differential cross-section for pair production of top quarks with high transverse momentum is measured in 20.3 fb\(^{-1}\) of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The measurement is performed for \(t\bar{t}\) events in the lepton+jets channel. The cross-section is reported as a function of the hadronically decaying top quark transverse momentum for values above 300 GeV. The hadronically decaying top quark is reconstructed as an anti-\(k_t\) jet with radius parameter \(R=1.0\) and identified with jet substructure techniques. The observed yield is corrected for detector effects to obtain a cross-section at particle level in a fiducial region close to the event selection. A parton-level cross-section extrapolated to the full phase space is also reported for top quarks with transverse momentum above 300 GeV. The predictions of a majority of next-to-leading-order and leading-order matrix-element Monte Carlo generators are found to agree with the measured cross-sections.