Benjamin FUKS - Toponium at the LHC: a new frontier in top-quark physics

Wednesday, October 8, 2025
1:30 p.m. — ConfIV (E244)

The top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, has long been thought unable to form bound states. However, intriguing hints in recent LHC data suggest that toponium, a short-lived quasi-bound state of a top-antitop pair, might have left observable traces in data and possibly even been discovered. In this talk, I will discuss why toponium is such a unique laboratory for studying the theory of the strong interaction in the non-relativistic regime, how modern techniques allow us to incorporate bound-state effects into state-of-the-art collider simulations, and what experimental signatures could reveal the presence of toponium in current and future LHC data. I will finally highlight recent results, ongoing searches and the exciting prospects for using toponium as a new window into the physics of the top quark.