Top-quark production in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at LHC energies and beyond

Single and pair top-quark production in proton-lead (p-Pb) and lead-lead (Pb-Pb) collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Future Circular Collider (FCC) energies, are studied with next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD calculations including nuclear parton distribution functions. At the LHC, the pair-production cross sections amount to sigma(t (t) over bar) = 3.4 mu b in Pb-Pb at root s(NN) = 5.5 TeV, and sigma(t (t) over bart) = 60 nb in p-Pb at root s(NN) = 8.8 TeV. At the FCC energies of root s(NN) = 39 and 63 TeV, the same cross sections are factors of 90 and 55 times larger respectively. In the leptonic final-state t (t) over bar --> W(+)b W-(b) over bar --> b (b) over bar ll nu nu with l = e(+/-), mu(+/-), after typical acceptance and efficiency cuts, one expects about 90 and 300 top-quarks per nominal LHC-year and 4.7 . 10(4) and 10(5) per FCC-year in Pb-Pb and p-Pb collisions respectively. The total t (t) over bar cross sections, dominated by gluon fusion processes, are enhanced by 3-8% in nuclear compared to p-p collisions due to an overall net gluon antishadowing, although different regions of their differential distributions are depleted due to shadowing or EMC-effect corrections. The rapidity distributions of the decay leptons in t (t) over bar processes can be used to reduce the uncertainty on the Pb gluon density at high virtualities by up to 30% at the LHC (full heavy-ion programme), and by 70% per FCC-year. The cross sections for single-top production in electroweak processes are also computed, yielding about a factor of 30 smaller number of measurable top-quarks after cuts, per system and per year. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.