Can We Observe Weak Anomalous Couplings of Heavy Quarks Through Three Jet Events?

Abstract

The rates and corresponding jet distributions for the decay $Z\to b\bar{b}g$ and the process $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to t\bar{t}g$ may be sensitive to anomalous dipole-like couplings of heavy quarks to the photon and $Z$. In the $b$-quark case, after updating our previous analysis on the constraints imposed by current experiments on $Zb\bar{b}$ anomalous couplings, we show that the variation of these couplings within their presently allowed ranges leads to rather minor modifications to the Standard Model expectations for $Z\to b\bar{b}g$ observables. In the $t$-quark case, significant deviations from the Standard Model predictions for $t\bar{t}g$ production at the Next Linear Collider are possible.

Comments: 26 pages with 9 embedded figures; gzipped, uuencoded postscript file. To obtain a copy of this paper send e-mail to techpub@slac.stanford.edu