  A search is performed for electroweak production of a vector-like top quark
partner T of charge 2/3 in association with a standard model top or bottom
quark, using 2.3 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collision data at sqrt(s)
= 13 TeV collected by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC. The search targets T
quarks decaying to a top quark and a Higgs boson in fully hadronic final
states. For a T quark with mass above 1 TeV the daughter top quark and Higgs
boson are highly Lorentz-boosted and can each appear as a single hadronic jet.
Jet substructure and b tagging techniques are used to identify the top quark
and Higgs boson jets, and to suppress the standard model backgrounds. An excess
of events is searched for in the T quark candidate mass distribution in the
data, which is found to be consistent with the expected backgrounds. Upper
limits at 95% confidence level are set on the product of the single T quark
production cross sections and the branching fraction B(T to tH), and these vary
between 0.31 and 0.93 pb for T quark masses in the range 1000-1800 GeV. This is
the first search for single electroweak production of a vector-like T quark in
fully hadronic final states.

High Energy Physics - Experiment