S S symmetry Article Optimized Probes of the CP Nature of the Top Quark Yukawa Coupling at Hadron Colliders Darius A. Faroughy 1, Blaž Bortolato 2, Jernej F. Kamenik 2,3,* , Nejc Košnik 2,3 and Aleks Smolkoviˇc 2 1 Physik-Institut, Universitat Zurich, CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland;
[email protected] 2 Jozef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia;
[email protected] (B.B.);
[email protected] (N.K.);
[email protected] (A.S.) 3 Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana, Jadranska 19, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia * Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract: We summarize our recent proposals for probing the CP-odd ik˜t¯g5th interaction at the LHC and its projected upgrades directly using associated on-shell Higgs boson and top quark or top quark pair production. We first recount how to construct a CP-odd observable based on top quark polarization in Wb ! th scattering with optimal linear sensitivity to k˜. For the corresponding hadronic process pp ! thj we then present a method of extracting the phase-space dependent weight function that allows to retain close to optimal sensitivity to k˜. For the case of top quark pair production in association with the Higgs boson, pp ! tth¯ , with semileptonically decaying tops, we instead show how one can construct manifestly CP-odd observables that rely solely on measuring the momenta of the Higgs boson and the leptons and b-jets from the decaying tops without having to distinguish the charge of the b-jets. Finally, we introduce machine learning (ML) and non-ML techniques to study the phase-space optimization of such CP-odd observables.