A precise characterisation of the top quark electro-weak vertices at the ILC

Abstract

Top quark production in the process $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to t\bar{t}$ at a future linear electron positron collider with polarised beams is a powerful tool to determine indirectly the scale of new physics. The presented study, based on a detailed simulation of the ILD detector concept, assumes a centre-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=500$GeV and a luminosity of $\mathcal{L}=500{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ equally shared between the incoming beam polarisations of ${\mathcal{P}}_{e^{-}},{\mathcal{P}}_{e^{+}}=\pm 0.8,\mp 0.3$. Events are selected in which the top pair decays semi-leptonically and the cross sections and the forward-backward asymmetries are determined. Based on these results, the vector, axial vector and tensorial $CP$ conserving couplings are extracted separately for the photon and the $Z^0$ component. With the expected precision, a large number of models in which the top quark acts as a messenger to new physics can be distinguished with many standard deviations. This will dramatically improve expectations from e.g. the LHC for electro-weak couplings of the top quark.

Comments: This work is an update of arXiv:1307.8102, minor changes w.r.t. v1 (typos, wrong grammar, incomplete sentences etc.)