Evidence for Four-Top Quark Production at the LHC

Abstract: The standard model production of four top quarks is predicted to have a cross section of the order of 12fb. The CMS Collaboration presents new results on this rare production mechanism for Run 2 data collected in 2016 through 2018 at 13 TeV, considering event signatures containing zero to four electrons or muons. This is the first time the all-hadronic channel is investigated in the study of four top quarks, made possible through novel machine learning based data-driven background estimation techniques.