TY - JOUR
T1 - Maximizing spin correlations in top quark pair production at the Tevatron
AU - Mahlon, Gregory
AU - Parke, Stephen
N1 - Funding Information:
The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) is operatedb y Universities ResearchA ssociation, Inc., under contractD E-AC02-76CH03000 with the U.S. Departmento f Energy. High energy physics researcha t the University of Michigan is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, under contract DE-FG02-95ER40899.
PY - 1997/10/9
Y1 - 1997/10/9
N2 - A comparison is made between the off-diagonal and helicity spin bases for top quark pair production at the FNAL Tevatron. In the off-diagonal basis, 92% of the top quark pairs are in the spin configuration up-down plus down-up, whereas in the helicity basis only 70% are left-right plus right-left. The off-diagonal basis maximizes the spin asymmetry and hence the measured angular correlations between the decay products, which are more than twice as big in this basis as compared to the helicity basis. In addition, for the process qq̄ → tt̄, we give a very simple analytic expression for the matrix element squared which includes all spin correlations between the production and subsequent decay of the top quarks.
AB - A comparison is made between the off-diagonal and helicity spin bases for top quark pair production at the FNAL Tevatron. In the off-diagonal basis, 92% of the top quark pairs are in the spin configuration up-down plus down-up, whereas in the helicity basis only 70% are left-right plus right-left. The off-diagonal basis maximizes the spin asymmetry and hence the measured angular correlations between the decay products, which are more than twice as big in this basis as compared to the helicity basis. In addition, for the process qq̄ → tt̄, we give a very simple analytic expression for the matrix element squared which includes all spin correlations between the production and subsequent decay of the top quarks.
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U2 - 10.1016/S0370-2693(97)00987-8
DO - 10.1016/S0370-2693(97)00987-8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0006436227
SN - 0370-2693
VL - 411
SP - 173
EP - 179
JO - Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics
JF - Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics
IS - 1-2
ER -