Single top quark photoproduction at the LHC

High-energy photon-proton interactions at the LHC offer interesting possibilities for the study of the electroweak sector up to TeV scale and searches for processes beyond the Standard Model. An analysis of the W associated single top photoproduction has been performed using the adapted MadGraph/MadEvent [F. Maltoni and T. Stelzer, JHEP0302, (2003) 027; T. Stelzer and W.F. Long, Phys. Commun. 81, (1994) 357–371] and CalcHEP [A. Pukhov, Nucl. Inst. Meth A502, (2003) 596–598] programs interfaced to the Pythia [T. Sjöstrand et al., Comput. Phys. Commun. 135, (2001) 238] generator and a fast detector simulation program. Event selection and suppression of main backgrounds have been studied. A comparable sensitivity to |Vtb| to those obtained using the standard single top production in pp collisions has been achieved already for 10fb−1 of integrated luminosity. Photoproduction at the LHC provides also an attractive framework for observation of the anomalous production of single top due to Flavour-Changing Neutral Currents. The sensitivity to anomalous coupling parameters, ktuγ and ktcγ is presented and indicates that stronger limits can be placed on anomalous couplings after 1fb−1.