The large ttbar production cross-section at the LHC suggests the use of top quark decays to calibrate several critical parts of the detectors, such as the trigger system, the jet energy scale and b-tagging.
A review of the main recent results on top quark production from the ATLAS and CMS experiments is presented. Results on both electroweak single top quark production and strong top pair production are presented.
Polarization of strange quarks is preserved to a high degree when they hadronize into Lambda baryons, as observed in Z decays at LEP. This opens up the possibility for ATLAS and CMS to use strange-quark polarization measurements as a characterization tool for new physics scenarios that produce such quarks. Measurements in ttbar samples would be useful for obtaining additional information about the polarization transfer from the strange quark to the Lambda baryon. Already with 100/fb in Run 2, ttbar samples in ATLAS and CMS become competitive in sensitivity with the Z samples of the LEP experiments. Moreover, while the LEP measurements were done inclusively over all quark flavors, which makes their interpretation dependent on various modeling assumptions, ttbar events at the LHC offer multiple handles for disentangling the different contributions experimentally. We also discuss the possibility of measuring polarizations of up and down quarks.
Searches for new physics in the top-quark sector using data from proton-antiproton collisions at the Fermilab Tevatron are discussed. The large data sets collected by the D0 and CDF experiments allow for precision measurements of the standard model (SM) top-quark production rates and top quark properties so that deviations from the SM expectations can be interpreted as signs of new physics. The presented analyses exploit the fact that the new physics would reveal itself in final states that are similar or identical to those of SM top-antitop production.
The LHC experiments will perform sensitive tests of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). The investigation of decays of beauty hadrons represents an alternative approach in addition to direct BSM searches. The ATLAS and CMS efforts concentrate on those B-decays that can be efficiently selected already at the first and second level trigger. The most favorable trigger signature will be for $B$-hadron decays with muons in the final state. Using this trigger, ATLAS and CMS will be able to accommodate unprecedentedly high statistics in the rare decay sector. These are purely dimuon decays, and families of semimuonic exclusive channels. Already with data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of ensuremath{1 fb^{-1}}, the sensitivity in the dimuon channels will be comparable to present measurements (world average). The strategy is to carry on the dimuon channel program up to nominal LHC luminosity. In particular the ensuremath{B_s to mumu} signal with ensuremath{sim}5 sigma significance can be measured combining low luminosity ensuremath{10^{33}cm^{-2} s^{-1}} samples with those of one year of LHC operation at a luminosity of ensuremath{10^{34}cm^{-2} s^{-1}
Measurements involving top quarks provide important tests of QCD. A selected set of top quark measurements in CMS including the strong coupling constant, top quark pole mass, constraints on parton distribution functions, top quark pair differential cross sections, ttbar+0 and >0 jet events, top quark mass studied using various kinematic variables in different phase-space regions, and alternative top quark mass measurements is presented. The evolution of expected uncertainties in future LHC runs for the standard and alternative top quark mass measurements is also presented.