Hadroproduction of four top quarks in the POWHEG BOX

Abstract

We present a new Monte Carlo event generator for the hadronic production of four top quarks in the POWHEG BOX framework. Besides the dominant next-to-leading order QCD corrections at $\mathcal{O}({\alpha }_s^5)$ we also include all subleading electroweak productions channels at leading-order accuracy. We validate our theoretical predictions by comparing to parton-shower matched predictions obtained within the MC@NLO framework for stable top quarks. Furthermore, we investigate in detail the various sources of theoretical uncertainties. Finally, we investigate a single lepton plus jets signature to study for the first time the impact of the electroweak production modes as well as spin-correlation effects at the fiducial level.

Comments: 14 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, matches published version