The analytic expressions for the production cross sections of polarized bottom and top quarks in $e^+e^-$ annihilation are explicitly derived at the one-loop order of strong interactions. Chirality-violating mass effects will reduce the longitudinal spin polarization for the light quark pairs by an amount of $3%$, when one properly considers the massless limit for the final quarks. Numerical estimates of longitudinal spin polarization effects in the processes $e^+e^-to bbar{b}(g)$ and $e^+e^- to tbar{t}(g)$ are presented.
We study the effects of O(alpha_s) supersymmetric QCD (SQCD) corrections on the total production rate and kinematic distributions of polarized and unpolarized top-pair production in pp and p anti-p collisions. At the Fermilab Tevatron p anti-p collider, top-quark pairs are mainly produced via quark-antiquark annihilation, q anti-q -> t anti-t, while at the CERN LHC pp collider gluon-gluon scattering, g g -> t anti-t, dominates. We compute the complete set of O(alpha_s) SQCD corrections to both production channels and study their dependence on the parameters of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. In particular, we discuss the prospects for observing strong, loop-induced SUSY effects in top-pair production at the Tevatron Run II and the LHC.
We present results for the differential distributions of jets from non-leptonic decays of polarized top quarks within the Standard Model, including QCD radiative corrections. Our work extends existing results which are only available for semileptonic top quark decays at the parton level. For $t(uparrow)$ -> b-jet + 2 light jets we compute in particular the QCD-corrected top-spin analysing power of the b-quark jet and the least energetic light jet. The dependence of the results on the choice of the jet recombination scheme is found to be small. In addition we compute the spin analysing power of the thrust axis. Our results constitute a so far missing ingredient to analyse top quark production and subsequent non-leptonic decay at next-to-leading order in alpha_s, keeping the full information on the top quark polarization.
We study pair production of scalar top quarks in polarized photon-photon collisions with the subsequent decay of the top squarks into b-quarks and charginos. We simulate this process by using PYTHIA6.4 for an electron beam energy 2E_beam =1000 GeV. A set of criteria for physical variables is proposed which leads to a good separation of stop signal events from top quark pair production being the main background. These criteria allow us to reconstruct the mass of the top squark provided that the neutralino mass is known.
We study the production of a Higgs boson in association with bottom quarks in hadronic collisions, and present phenomenological predictions relevant to the 13 TeV LHC. Our results are accurate to the next-to-leading order in QCD, and matched to parton showers through the MC@NLO method; thus, they are fully differential and based on unweighted events, which we shower by using both Herwig++ and Pythia8. We perform the computation in both the four-flavour and the five-flavour schemes, whose results we compare extensively at the level of exclusive observables. In the case of the Higgs transverse momentum, we also consider the analytically-resummed cross section up to the NNLO+NNLL accuracy. In addition, we analyse at ${cal O}(alpha_S^3)$ the effects of the interference between the $bbar{b}H$ and gluon-fusion production modes.
We study jet substructures of a boosted polarized top quark, which undergoes the semileptonic decay $tto bell u$, in the perturbative QCD framework. The jet mass distribution (energy profile) is factorized into the convolution of a hard top-quark decay kernel with the bottom-quark jet function (jet energy function). Computing the hard kernel to leading order in QCD and inputting the latter functions from the resummation formalism, we observe that the jet mass distribution is not sensitive to the helicity of the top quark, but the energy profile is: energy is accumulated faster within a left-handed top jet than within a right-handed one, a feature related to the $V-A$ structure of weak interaction. It is pointed out that the energy profile is a simple and useful jet observable for helicity discrimination of a boosted top quark, which helps identification of physics beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider. The extension of our analysis to other jet substructures, including those associated with a hadronically decaying polarized top quark, is proposed.