The production of top quarks in single mode at future ep colliders is
studied, the attention being mainly focused to the case of the proposed LEPXLHC
collider. We are motivated to reanalyse such a process following the discovery
of the top quark at Fermilab. Thanks to the measurement of its mass one is now
able to establish more accurately the relevance of single top production for
itself and for many other processes to which it may act as a background. In
addition, the recent improvement of our knowledge of the quark and gluon
dynamics inside the proton now allows one to pin down the dependence of single
top production on the partonic structure functions. Both the leptonic and
hadronic decay channels of the top quark are studied and compared to the yield
of the corresponding irreducible background in presence of b-taggingComment: 28 pages, latex, epsfig, 10 postscript figures, complete paper
available at ftp://axpa.hep.phy.cam.ac.uk/moretti/cavendish_9704 and at
http://www.hep.phy.cam.ac.uk/theory/papers
