Top Quark Interactions and the Search for New Physics

Abstract

We give a complete set of 19 independent effective dimension 5 interactions involving the top and bottom quarks with the electroweak gauge bosons within the context of the chiral Lagrangian. The anomalous operators contribute to the leading energy power E^3 of the V_L V_L -> t\bar t or t\bar b amplitudes. We also show the top quark production rates at the LHC and the LC via V_L V_L fusion processes. If no anomalous production rate is found, then these coefficients can be bound (based on the naive dimensional analysis) to be of order 10^{-2} or 10^{-1}. This is about an order of magnitude more stringent than the bounds for the next-to-leading order bosonic operators commonly studied in V_L V_L -> V_L V_L scatterings. The effect on a CP-odd observable is also briefly discussed.

Comments: 48 pages, LaTeX, 12 eps figures, uses psfig.tex. To appear on Phys. Rev. D. Corrections in several sections, and in some equations, including amplitudes. Spelling, typos and some references have been corrected