Review of Properties of the Top Quark from Measurements at the Tevatron

This review summarizes the program in the physics of the top quark being pursued at Fermilab's Tevatron proton-antiproton collider at a center of mass energy of 1.96 TeV. More than a decade after the discovery of the top quark at the two collider detectors CDF and D0, the Tevatron has been the only accelerator to produce top quarks and to study them directly. The Tevatron's increased luminosity and center of mass energy offer the possibility to scrutinize the properties of this heaviest fundamental particle through new measurements that were not feasible before, such as the first evidence for electroweak production of top quarks and the resulting direct constraints on the involved couplings. Better measurements of top quark properties provide more stringent tests of predictions from the standard model of elementary particle physics. In particular, the improvement in measurements of the mass of the top quark, with the latest uncertainty of 0.7% marking the most precisely measured quark mass to date, further constrains the prediction of the mass of the still to be discovered Higgs boson.Comment: Revised and updated for publication in Int. J. Mod. Phys. A. 138 pages, 55 figures, 22 table

Z' Bosons, the NuTeV Anomaly, and the Higgs Boson Mass

Fits to the precision electroweak data that include the NuTeV measurement are considered in family universal, anomaly free U(1) extensions of the Standard Model. In data sets from which the hadronic asymmetries are excluded, some of the Z' models can double the predicted value of the Higgs boson mass, from ~ 60 to ~ 120 GeV, removing the tension with the LEP II lower bound, while also modestly improving the chi-square confidence level. The effect of the Z' models on both the Higgs boson mass and the chi-square confidence level is increased when the NuTeV measurment is included in the fit. Both the original NuTeV data and a revised estimate by the PDG are considered