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Accessing CKM suppressed top decays at the LHC

by Darius A. Faroughy, Jernej F. Kamenik, Manuel Szewc, Jure Zupan

Submission summary

Abstract

We propose an extension of the existing experimental strategy for measuring branching fractions of top quark decays, targeting specifically $t\to j_q W$, where $j_q$ is a light quark jet. The improved strategy uses orthogonal $b$- and $q$-taggers, and adds a new observable, the number of light-quark-tagged jets, to the already commonly used observable, the fraction of $b$-tagged jets in an event. Careful inclusion of the additional complementary observable significantly increases the expected statistical power of the analysis, with the possibility of excluding $|V_{tb}|=1$ at $95\%$ C.L. at the HL-LHC, and accessing directly the standard model value of $|V_{td}|^2+|V_{ts}|^2$.