Threshold production of unstable top
Abstract
We develop a systematic approach to describe the finite lifetime effects in the threshold production of top quark-antiquark pairs. It is based on the nonrelativistic effective field theory with an additional scale rho^(1/2) m_t characterizing the dynamics of the top-quark decay, which involves a new expansion parameter rho=1-m_W/m_t. Our method naturally resolves the problem of spurious divergences in the analysis of the unstable top production. Within this framework we compute the next-to-leading nonresonant contribution to the total cross section of the top quark-antiquark threshold production in electron-positron annihilation through high-order expansion in rho and confirm the recently obtained result. We extend the analysis to the next-to-next-to-leading O(alpha_s) nonresonant contribution which is derived in the leading order in rho. The dominant nonresonant contribution to the top-antitop threshold production in hadronic collisions is also obtained.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1110.1970,
title = {Threshold production of unstable top},
author = {Alexander A. Penin and Jan H. Piclum},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1110.1970},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
20 pages, 7 figures; v2: added a section on invariant mass cuts and one reference, minor changes in Introduction, results unchanged, matches published version