Description
High-energy collider events involving the production and decays of top quarks present a unique and formidable combination of theoretically challenging physics effects: final states with large numbers of jets, heavy-quark fragmentation, sequential resonance decays with GeV-scale widths, and non-trivial confinement effects exacerbated by the top quarks themselves carrying QCD colour charges. This makes them extremely difficult to make precise theoretical predictions for. Nevertheless, with dozens of top quarks produced per second at the Large Hadron Collider, we are now entering an era of per-mille level experimental measurements. Many searches for new physics also require a solid understanding of them to suppress them as backgrounds. I will discuss the state of the art of the physical modelling of top-quark production and decays at hadron colliders, highlighting current theoretical questions and the advances I believe will be necessary to address them.
| I am the presenting author | Yes |
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