MEASUREMENT OF BOOSTED DIFFERENTIAL TOP QUARK PAIR PRODUCTION CROSS SECTION AT 13 TEV WITH THE CMS DETECTOR

Abstract

This thesis describes a measurement of the differential top quark pair production cross section for top quarks with high transverse momentum (pt) in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The measurement is performed using data collected by the CMS experiment during the 2016 data-taking period, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb-1. The measurement is performed using events where one top quark decays hadronically and is reconstructed as a single large-radius t jet with pt > 400 GeV, while the other top quark decays leptonically to a b jet, an electron or a muon, and a neutrino. Jet substructure techniques are used to identify the large-radius jet as a t jet candidate. The measurement demonstrates that current simulations overpredict the rate of top quark pair production at high pt, providing valuable feedback on the accuracy of current simulation.