Probing the flavor of the top quark decay

Abstract

The top quark sector is almost decoupled from lighter quark generations due to the fact that $V_{tb}\approx$~1. The current experimental measurements of $V_{tb}$ are compatible with the Standard Model expectations but are still dominated by experimental uncertainties. In this manuscript, a revision of the experimental methods used to measure $V_{tb}$ is given, and a simple method to probe heavy flavor content fraction of top quark events, $R=B(t\to Wb)/B(t\to Wq)$, is presented and discussed. Prospects for the measurements at the Large Hadron Collider based on generator level simulations are outlined.

Comments: The original method presented in this manuscript is partially described in "Probing the Heavy Flavor Content of Top quark events produced in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider with the CMS detector", Pedro Silva, PhD Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal (2009)