Top Quark Production at TeV Energies as a Potential SUSY Detector

Abstract

We consider the process of top-antitop production from electron-positron annihilation, for c. m. energies in the few TeV regime, in the MSSM theoretical framework. We show that, at the one loop level, the \underline{slopes} of a number of observable quantities in an energy region around 3 TeV are only dependent on $\tan \beta$. Under optimal experimental conditions, a combined measurement of slopes might identify $\tan \beta$ values in a range $\tan \beta <2$, $\tan \beta >20$ with acceptable precision.

Comments: 14 pages, 6 Encapsulated PostScript figures