Evidence for tt¯ tt¯ production in the multilepton final state in proton–proton collisions at √s=13 TeV with the ATLAS detector : European Physical Journal C

Collaboration, ATLAS and Barton, A.E. and Bertram, I.A. and Borissov, G. and Bouhova-Thacker, E.V. and Fox, H. and Henderson, R.C.W. and Jones, R.W.L. and Kartvelishvili, V. and Long, R.E. and Love, P.A. and Muenstermann, D. and Parker, A.J. and Sanderswood, Izaac and Smizanska, M. and Tee, A.S. and Walder, J. and Wharton, A.M. and Whitmore, B.W. and Yexley, Melissa (2020) Evidence for tt¯ tt¯ production in the multilepton final state in proton–proton collisions at √s=13 TeV with the ATLAS detector : European Physical Journal C. Eur. Phys. J. C, 80 (11): 1085. ISSN 1434-6044

Abstract

A search is presented for four-top-quark production using an integrated luminosity of 139 fb-1 of proton–proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 13TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are selected if they contain a same-sign lepton pair or at least three leptons (electrons or muons). Jet multiplicity, jet flavour and event kinematics are used to separate signal from the background through a multivariate discriminant, and dedicated control regions are used to constrain the dominant backgrounds. The four-top-quark production cross section is measured to be 24-6+7 fb. This corresponds to an observed (expected) significance with respect to the background-only hypothesis of 4.3 (2.4) standard deviations and provides evidence for this process.