Boosted Top Tagging through Flavour-violating interactions at the LHC (2310.10763v1)

Abstract: We focus on a rare, exotic decay channel of the top quark, $t\to cH$, with $H$ decaying to a pair of b-quarks produced at the High Luminosity runs of the Large Hadron Collider. Our intent is to formulate a tagging algorithm which is efficient in identifying the said decay mode of the boosted top using a large-R jet with b- and c-tagged jets inside it. We consider the production of the top quark in association with a W-boson with the top decaying through $cH$ mode, and identify different observables as the effective discriminators of the signal over the Standard Model (SM) backgrounds, and finally perform a Multi Variate Analysis (MVA) using two different boosting algorithms, viz., XGBoost and AdaBoost. We show a comparative analysis on the performance of the proposed top tagger for the two boosting algorithms, and also with conventional cut-based top tagging algorithms. The algorithm we propose shows greater efficiency over the conventional ones. Furthermore, we make use of the mathematical formalism, SHAP, originated in the Game Theory to understand the role played by each observable towards the discriminative power of the classifier. This provides a great insight of the observables used to build the classifier. The tagging algorithm proposed in this work has wider range of applicability, it can be implemented in any probes of BSM Physics involving large-R, boosted jets with substructures involving b- and c-jets. As an illustration, we consider the Vector-like quark $Y$ decaying to b-quark and a $W$-boson which resembles the inner structure of the proposed toptagger. We observe clear resonance peak at the mass of the Y which proves that the proposed tagger is useful not only to tag the top quarks decaying through the above-mentioned flavour-violating mode, also is equally efficient in probing a BSM particle giving the same final state topology.