Direct Experimental probe of the Lorenz invariance violation in the Top-quark physics at the ATLAS experiment.

Project Information

DELTA

Grant agreement ID: 101033496

DOI

10.3030/101033496

Project closed

EC signature date 21 April 2021

Start date 1 July 2021

End date 30 September 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 140 021,76

EU contribution

€ 140 021,76

Coordinated by

INSTITUT ZA FIZIKU
Serbia

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DELTA (Direct Experimental probe of the Lorenz invariance violation in the Top-quark physics at the ATLAS experiment.)

Reporting period: 2021-07-01 to 2023-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Standard Model (SM) is a theory which accurately describes the elementary constituents of matter and interactions between them at the energy scales we have been able to probe in experiments up to the present day. However, since in the Nature we observe physics phenomena beyond the SM, it is expected that the SM is a low-energy effective approximation of a theory that describes the physics of particles and their interactions in a broader way. Lorentz Invariance is a fundamental symmetry of the SM, but it is not expected to be conserved necessarily at the high energy scale of quantum gravity where space-time could undergo violent fluctuations. The violation of the Lorenz invariance (LIV), which is predicted by some extensions of the SM theory, would manifests itself at energies accessible by the experiments nowadays. This project DELTA, represents the first search for the possible LIV in the top quark interactions at the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The research objectives of the project are to further develop existing phenomenological studies to identify observables most sensitive to LIV in the top quark-antiquark pair production, to develop the novel framework for analysing data as a function of the orientation of the experiment in space-time continuum, to study the time-dependence of the ATLAS detector performance and to perform state-of-the-art LHC proton-proton collision data analysis probing the Lorenz invariance in the interactions of the top quarks to the unprecedented level.
The primary research domain of the project is the field of high energy physics (HEP). Like any other fundamental research, it is crucial to human advancement, even when no immediate applications of the gained fundamental knowledge and insights are foreseen.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Standard Model Extension (SME) is an extension of the SM that incorporates in a model independent way the effects of LIV and effects of the violation of the CPT symmetry, and allows to study the experimental signatures of these effects at the energies accessible by the collider experiments nowadays. The first part of the project was focused on the phenomenological study necessary to simulate the LIV effects in the process of top quark-antiquark pair production. Given that the currently available common Monte Carlo based software tools can not simulate the necessary processes according to a model that explicitly violates Lorentz invariance, I developed, a software tool that allows to modify the weight of the events that are simulated using the SM model for the top quark-antiquark production so that the distributions of an arbitrary observable based on these modified events match the expected distributions of the corresponding observables based on the events that would have been generated according to the SME model. This procedure has allowed to study the expected LIV effects for any value of the parameters of the SME model, without a need for explicit generation of the corresponding events. Furthermore, it has allowed to systematically study and identify the experimental observables that are most sensitive to the LIV effects in the process of interest, and that can provide the best discrimination between the SME and SM hypotheses.
The second part of the project included the studies that were necessary to perform the measurement using the proton-proton collision data collected with the ATLAS experiment during the LHC Run 2 in the period 2015 - 2018. The measurement is performed as a function of ATLAS detector orientation in the Sun-centred reference frame (with respect the so called side-real time) optimised to probe the modulations of the cross-section of the top quark-antiquark pair production as a function of the side-real time. While the measurement is significantly relying on ATLAS experiment centrally produced datasets, significant part of the work is invested to understand and validate the detector performance as a function of the side-real time, and determine necessary corrections to account for the side-real time dependence of the detector performance. In particular, the analysis has considered integrated luminosity, distribution of the pile-up events and trigger efficiencies to depend on the side-real time. Furthermore, the state of the art machine learning techniques are used to identify particles according to their signature in the detector, and to match them to their constituents at the interaction point. The SME signal events are obtained by reweighting the SM top quark-antiquark pair production simulated sample based on the derived reweighting function. The event selections are applied to enhance in the sample the events with the topology of the interest, and to suppress the events with other topologies. To extract the values of the top quark-antiquark cross section in each bin of the side-real time a maximal likelihood fit formalism is applied. All systematic uncertainties associated to the measurement are implemented as a nuisance parameters in the fit. Once the analysis and the result of the measurement are approved by the ATLAS collaboration, these will be submitted for publication in one of the major international scientific journal and linked from the project webpage: https://www.ipb.ac.rs/delta/

The measurement is presented to the ATLAS collaboration attracting the interest of colleagues and establishing new avenue/searches (not involving the top quarks) for probing the physics beyond the Standard Model with the ATLAS experiment. As a part of the project, the international workshop dedicated to the possibilities to test the space-time properties with the collider experiment has been organised at the home institution, gathering across the world the key theorists and experimentalist from the field. During the period of the project, I have presented multiple times the research goals of this projects introducing them to the research field at the student seminars yearly events, subsequently supervised bachelor and master students, and took part in organisation, lecturing and tutoring of the high school students from Serbia at the CERNs High School Students Internship Programme. In addition, I have also disseminated the research related to this project and HEP in general at the public media.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Research and cooperation between the physicists from the domains of the theoretical and experimental physics during the time of the project have resulted directly or indirectly in "beyond the state-of-the-art" progress in several aspects. First, these have resulted in advanced phenomenological studies by the theoretical physicists on possibilities for testing the Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) at the LHC in the sector of the physic of electroweak and top quark interactions. Second, it has introduced the detailed study of the time-dependence of the ATLAS detector performance and better understanding of its response allowing for a lower uncertainty in the corresponding measurements with this experiment. Third, it has brought the attention to the community of the theoretical physicists about the necessity for dedicated software tools and simulation methods that would allow for the systematic tests of the LIV effects by simultaneous measurement of multiple scattering processes at HEP colliders, and the implementation of the first necessary functionalities in the common HEP software tools has already started.

Top anti-top pair production in Lorentz invariance violating models