The Present and Future of Four Top Operators

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We study the phenomenology of a strongly-interacting top quark at future hadron and lepton colliders, showing that the characteristic four-top contact operators give rise to the most significant effects.

• We demonstrate the extraordinary potential of a 100 TeV proton-proton collider to directly test such non-standard interactions in four-top production, a process that we thoroughly analyze in the same-sign dilepton and trilepton channels, and explore in the fully hadronic channel.
• Furthermore, high-energy electron-positron colliders, such as CLIC or the ILC, are shown to exhibit an indirect yet remarkable sensitivity to four-top operators, since these constitute, via renormalization group evolution, the leading new-physics deformations in top-quark pair production.
• We investigate the impact of our results on the parameter space of composite Higgs models with a strongly-coupled (right-handed) top quark, finding that four-top probes provide the best sensitivity on the compositeness scale at the future energy frontier.