New physics signals in top physics

Effective Field Theory (EFT) provides a model-independent way to search for new physics if the new degrees of freedom are heavy. The new physics appears then as new interactions between the known particles including modification of the SM vertices. In the Lagrangian, they are written as new operators built from the SM fields and invariant under its symmetries. These operators have dimension higher than four and are suppressed by negative powers of the new physics scale Λ to get the required dimension for the Lagrangian. Only the operators with the lower dimension, i.e. dimension-six, can be kept in good approximation since the new physics scale is well above the energies probed by the experiments. Consequently, EFT is valid only below the scale of the new physics. In this region, the unitary bound is never reached and no form factors are needed unlike for anomalous couplings (see [1] for a complete discussion of the advantages of EFT compared to anomalous couplings). EFT is also more predictive due to the symmetries. For example, an operator often contains several vertices with different numbers of legs all depending on its coefficient only. The symmetries also make the EFT Lagrangian renormalizable and allow loop computation. Despite that the number of dimension-six operators that can be added to the SM Lagrangian is large, only a few contribute to a particular process and they can usually be distinguished using several observables. This will be illustrated in the following for top pair production. The complete discussion and list of references can be found in ref. [2]. The only references hereafter are new measurements or computations that have been used to update the results from ref. [2]