Top-quark identification through isolated energetic leptons

The authors investigate the possibility of identifying top quarks by tagging isolated electrons and muons from their semileptonic decays. They develop a simple algorithm which finds 10-20% of all tt-bar events and greatly reduces the background from ordinary QCD jets. They then use a jet algorithm to reconstruct the invariant mass of di-jets with isolated leptons. The authors' methods rely principally on good calorimetric energy resolution at high energy. The authors conclude that it will be straightforward to detect new particles in the mass range 200 to 1000 GeVc2 which decay to tt-bar and which are produced with cross sections greater than 1-10 pb in a high-luminosity, 40 TeV hadron collider