W-boson helicity fractions in top decay as probes of dimension-6 and dimension-8 SMEFT operators

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Hauptverfasser: Kianfar, Afsaneh, Haghighat, Gholamhossein, Najafabadi, Mojtaba Mohammadi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Kianfar, Afsaneh
Haghighat, Gholamhossein
Najafabadi, Mojtaba Mohammadi
author_facet Kianfar, Afsaneh
Haghighat, Gholamhossein
Najafabadi, Mojtaba Mohammadi
contents Precision measurements of top-quark decays provide powerful probes of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). While the impact of dimension-6 operators in the SM Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) has been extensively studied, the role of dimension-8 contributions remains largely unexplored, despite their potential importance as experimental precision improves. In this work, we present a combined analysis of dimension-6 and a representative subset of dimension-8 SMEFT effects using the W-boson helicity fractions in top-quark decays. We compute the leading-order contributions of these operators to the top-quark decay width and helicity fractions, and perform one-parameter and selected two-parameter $χ^{2}$ fits to the combined ATLAS and CMS measurements at a reference scale $Λ=1$~TeV. From the fit results, we find that the inclusion of dimension-8 contributions affects the allowed parameter space of several dimension-6 coefficients through non-trivial correlations and degeneracies. Since the leading dimension-8 contributions enter at the same order $\mathcal{O}(Λ^{-4})$ as the squared dimension-6 terms retained in our analysis, this highlights the importance of a consistent treatment of the EFT expansion when interpreting SMEFT constraints.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_00819
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle W-boson helicity fractions in top decay as probes of dimension-6 and dimension-8 SMEFT operators
Kianfar, Afsaneh
Haghighat, Gholamhossein
Najafabadi, Mojtaba Mohammadi
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Precision measurements of top-quark decays provide powerful probes of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). While the impact of dimension-6 operators in the SM Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) has been extensively studied, the role of dimension-8 contributions remains largely unexplored, despite their potential importance as experimental precision improves. In this work, we present a combined analysis of dimension-6 and a representative subset of dimension-8 SMEFT effects using the W-boson helicity fractions in top-quark decays. We compute the leading-order contributions of these operators to the top-quark decay width and helicity fractions, and perform one-parameter and selected two-parameter $χ^{2}$ fits to the combined ATLAS and CMS measurements at a reference scale $Λ=1$~TeV. From the fit results, we find that the inclusion of dimension-8 contributions affects the allowed parameter space of several dimension-6 coefficients through non-trivial correlations and degeneracies. Since the leading dimension-8 contributions enter at the same order $\mathcal{O}(Λ^{-4})$ as the squared dimension-6 terms retained in our analysis, this highlights the importance of a consistent treatment of the EFT expansion when interpreting SMEFT constraints.
title W-boson helicity fractions in top decay as probes of dimension-6 and dimension-8 SMEFT operators
topic High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00819