Determination of the strong coupling constant ${\alpha }_s(m_Z)$ from measurements of the total cross section for top-antitop quark production

Abstract

We present a determination of the strong coupling constant ${\alpha }_s(m_Z)$ using inclusive top-quark pair production cross section measurements performed at the LHC and at the Tevatron. Following a procedure first applied by the CMS collaboration, we extract individual values of ${\alpha }_s(m_Z)$ from measurements by different experiments at several centre-of-mass energies, using QCD predictions complete in NNLO perturbation theory, supplemented with NNLL approximations to all orders, and suitable sets of parton distribution functions. The determinations are then combined using a likelihood-based approach, where special emphasis is put on a consistent treatment of theoretical uncertainties and of correlations between various sources of systematic uncertainties. Our final combined result is ${\alpha }_s(m_Z)=0.1177_{-0.0036}^{+0.0034}$.

Comments: 23 pages, 4 figures; v2 adds clarifications and further analysis details