Paper detail

Measurement of the correlations between the polar angles of leptons from top quark decays in the helicity basis at $\sqrt{s}=7$TeV using the ATLAS detector

A measurement of the correlations between the polar angles of leptons from the decay of pair-produced $t$ and $\bar{t}$ quarks in the helicity basis is reported, using proton-proton collision data collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 4.6fb$^{-1}$ at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=7$TeV collected during 2011. Candidate events are selected in the dilepton topology with large missing transverse momentum and at least two jets. The angles $θ_1$ and $θ_2$ between the charged leptons and the direction of motion of the parent quarks in the $t\bar{t}$ rest frame are sensitive to the spin information, and the distribution of {\mbox{$\cosθ_1\cdot\cosθ_2$}} is sensitive to the spin correlation between the $t$ and $\bar{t}$ quarks. The distribution is unfolded to parton level and compared to the next-to-leading order prediction. A good agreement is observed.