Top Quark Charge Asymmetry: Searching for Light Axigluons in top pair + jet Production at the LHC

We investigate the discovery potential of light color-octet bosons in the mass range of 100 - 400 GeV in exclusive top-pair plus jet production at the LHC. We study the impact of such bosons on the incline, the energy and the rapidity asymmetries. We show that light axigluons with large couplings to quarks can be discovered at the LHC with a luminosity of a few inverse fb. Almost all of the considered axigluon parameter space can be probed using the already available 2011/2012 LHC data. In a small-coupling scenario, axigluons could be discovered using the charge asymmetry with 65 inverse fb at the LHC and a center of mass energy of 14 TeV. We furthermore show that top pair+jet production could reveal the existence of scenarios where axigluons couple with a different strength to up- and down-type quarks.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figures, 1 tabl

How strange is pion electroproduction?

We consider pion production in parity-violating electron scattering (PVES) in the presence of nucleon strangeness in the framework of partial wave analysis with unitarity. Using the experimental bounds on the strange form factors obtained in elastic PVES, we study the sensitivity of the parity-violating asymmetry to strange nucleon form factors. For forward kinematics and electron energies above 1 GeV, we observe that this sensitivity may reach about 20\% in the threshold region. With parity-violating asymmetries being as large as tens p.p.m., this study suggests that threshold pion production in PVES can be used as a promising way to better constrain strangeness contributions. Using this model for the neutral current pion production, we update the estimate for the dispersive $\gamma Z$-box correction to the weak charge of the proton. In the kinematics of the Qweak experiment, our new prediction reads Re$\,\Box_{\gamma Z}^V(E=1.165\,{\rm GeV}) = (5.58\pm1.41)\times10^{-3}$, an improvement over the previous uncertainty estimate of $\pm2.0\times10^{-3}$. Our new prediction in the kinematics of the upcoming MESA/P2 experiment reads Re$\,\Box_{\gamma Z}^V(E=0.155\,{\rm GeV}) = (1.1\pm0.2) \times 10^{-3}$.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure

Higgs CP properties using the tau decay modes at the ILC

We investigate the prospects of determining the CP nature of the 126 GeV neutral spin-0 (Higgs) boson h, discovered at the LHC, at a future linear collider. We consider the production of h by the Higgsstrahlung process and its subsequent decays to tau leptons. We investigate how precisely a possible pseudoscalar component of h can be detected by the measurement of a suitably defined angular distribution, if all major decay modes of the tau lepton are used. From our numerical simulations, we estimate the expected precision to the scalar-pseudoscalar mixing angle, including estimates of the background and of measurement uncertainties, to be 2.8 degree for Higgs-boson production at a center-of-mass energy of 250 GeV and for a collider with integrated luminosity of 1 inverse attobarn.Comment: Journal versio

Mixed EW-QCD two-loop amplitudes for qqˉ→ℓ+ℓ−q\bar{q} \to \ell^+\ell^- and γ5\gamma_5 scheme independence of multi-loop corrections

We perform a dedicated study of the $q \bar{q}$-initiated two-loop electroweak-QCD Drell-Yan scattering amplitude in dimensional regularization schemes for vanishing light quark and lepton masses. For the relative order $\alpha$ and $\alpha_s$ one-loop Standard Model corrections, details of our comparison to the original literature are given. The infrared pole terms of the mixed two-loop amplitude are governed by a known generalization of the dipole formula and we show explicitly that exactly the same two-loop polarized hard scattering functions are obtained in both the standard 't Hooft-Veltman-Breitenlohner-Maison $\gamma_5$ scheme and Kreimer's anticommuting $\gamma_5$ scheme.Comment: 65 pages, 6 figures; ancillary files with result