Searches for new physics with boosted top quarks in the MadAnalysis 5 and Rivet frameworks

Abstract

High-momentum top quarks are a natural physical system in collider experiments for testing models of new physics, and jet substructure methods are key both to exploiting their largest decay mode and to assuaging resolution difficulties as the boosted system becomes increasingly collimated in the detector. To be used in new-physics interpretation studies, it is crucial that related methods get implemented in analysis frameworks allowing for the reinterpretation of the results of the LHC such as MadAnalysis 5 and Rivet. We describe the implementation of the HEPTopTagger algorithm in these two frameworks, and we exemplify the usage of the resulting functionalities to explore the sensitivity of boosted top reconstruction performance to new physics contributions from the Standard Model Effective Field Theory. The results of this study lead to important conclusions about the implicit assumption of Standard-Model-like top-quark decays in associated collider analyses, and for the prospects to constrain the Standard Model Effective Field Theory via kinematic observables built from boosted semileptonic top-antitop events selected using HEPTopTagger.