The single top quark production has an electroweak nature and provides an additional to the top pair production source of the top quarks. The processes involving single top have unique properties, they are very interesting from both theoretical and experimental view points. Short review of the single top quark production processes is given in the paper.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is expected to provide proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV, yielding millions of of top quark events. The top-physics potential of the two general purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS, is discussed according to state-of-the-art simulation of both physics and detectors. An overview is given of the most important results with emphasis on the expected improvements in our understanding of physics connected to the top quark.
We present an overview of Top Quark Physics - from what has been learned so far at the Tevatron, to the searches that lie ahead at present and future colliders. We summarize the richness of the measurements and discuss their possible impact on our understanding of the Standard Model by pointing out their key elements and limitations. When possible, we discuss how the top quark may provide a connection to new or unexpected physics.
High-energy photon-proton interactions at the LHC offer interesting possibilities for the study of the electroweak sector up to TeV scale and searches for processes beyond the Standard Model. An analysis of the W associated single top photoproduction has been performed using the adapted MadGraph/MadEvent and CalcHEP programs interfaced to the Pythia generator and a fast detector simulation program. Event selection and suppression of main backgrounds have been studied. A comparable sensitivity to |V_{tb}| to those obtained using the standard single top production in pp collisions has been achieved already for 10 fb^{-1} of integrated luminosity. Photoproduction at the LHC provides also an attractive framework for observation of the anomalous production of single top due to Flavour-Changing Neutral Currents. The sensitivity to anomalous coupling parameters, k_{tugamma} and k_{tcgamma} is presented and indicates that stronger limits can be placed on anomalous couplings after 1 fb^{-1}.