Weak Interactions in Top-Quark Pair Production at Hadron Colliders: An Update

Weak corrections for top-quark pair production at hadron colliders are revisited. Predictions for collider energies of 8 TeV, adopted to the recent LHC run, and for 13 as well as 14 TeV, presumably relevant for the next round of LHC experiments, are presented. Kinematic regions with large momentum transfer are identified, where the corrections become large and may lead to strong distortions of differential distributions, thus mimicking anomalous top quark couplings. As a complementary case we investigate the threshold region, corresponding to configurations with small relative velocity between top and antitop quark, which is particularly sensitive to the top-quark Yukawa coupling. We demonstrate, that nontrivial upper limits on this coupling, complementary to those recently derived by the CMS and the ATLAS collaorations, are well within reach of ongoing experiments. In addition we suggest a prescription that allows the implementation of these corrections in current Monte Carlo generators. Furthermore, the weak corrections have been included in the publicly available Hathor library. The numerical results presented in this article use the same setup as the recently calculated NNLO QCD corrections. The results can thus be combined to give the most precise theoretical predictions.Comment: Updated version with extended discussion on the top-quark Yukawa coupling, input parameters updated to recent value

The top-quark's running mass

We discuss the direct determination of the running top-quark mass from measurements of the total cross section of hadronic top-quark pair-production. The theory predictions in the MSbar scheme are very stable under scale variations and show rapid apparent convergence of the perturbative expansion. These features are explained by studying the underlying parton dynamics.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures; to appear in Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Radiative Corrections, RADCOR 2009, Ascona, Switzerland, October 200

Revisiting Bremsstrahlung emission associated with Light Dark Matter annihilations

We compute the single bremsstrahlung emission associated with the pair annihilation of spin-0 particles into electrons and positrons, via the t-channel exchange of a heavy fermion. We compare our result with the work of Beacom et al. . Unlike what is stated in the literature, we show that the Bremsstrahlung cross section is not necessarily given by the tree-level annihilation cross section (for a generalized kinematics) times a factor related to the emission of a soft photon. Such a factorization appears only in the soft photon limit or in the approximation where the masses of the particles in the initial and final states are negligible with respect to the mass of the internal particle. However, in the latter case, we do not recover the same factor as for e^+ e- --> mu^+ mu^- gamma. Numerically the difference, in the hard photon limit, is as large as a factor 3.6. However the effect on the upper limit of the dark matter mass is not significant. Using gamma ray observations, we obtain an upper limit on the dark matter mass of 30 or 100 MeV (depending on the region that is considered for the 511 keV analysis) while Beacom et al. found 20 MeV

Investigation of Top quark spin correlations at hadron collider

We report on our results about hadronic $t\bar t$ production at NLO QCD including $t, \bar t$ spin effects, especially on $t\bar t$ spin correlations.Comment: talk given at the 32nd International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP'04), Beijing, China, 16-22 Aug. 200

Extracting the top-quark running mass using ttˉt\bar{t}+1-jet events produced at the Large Hadron Collider

We present the calculation of the next-to-leading order QCD corrections for top-quark pair production in association with an additional jet at hadron colliders, using the modified minimal subtraction scheme to renormalize the top-quark mass. The results are compared to measurements at the Large Hadron Collider run I. In particular, we determine the top-quark running mass from a fit of the theoretical results presented here to the LHC data

The spin density matrix of top quark pairs produced in electron-positron annihilation including QCD radiative corrections

We calculate the spin density matrix of top quark pairs for the reaction $e^+e^-\to t\bar{t}X$ to order $\alpha_s$. As an application we show next-to-leading order results for a variety of spin observables for the $t\bar{t}$ system. These include the top quark and antiquark polarizations and $t\bar{t}$ spin-spin correlations as a function of the center-of-mass energy and of the top quark scattering angle for arbitrary longitudinal polarization of the electron/positron beam.Comment: 26 pages, 13 Postscript figures, uses REVTE