Top-quark polarization at the Fermilab Tevatron

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Abstract
With the prospects of finding the top quark at Fermilab comes the potential for new tests of the standard model and new probes of physics at the 100-GeV scale. Though the production rate for tt¯ pairs is expected to be small at Fermilab, it may be possible to perform a first-level study of the interactions of the top quark, including polarization effects. In this paper we discuss the standard model predictions for the polarization of a top quark produced in proton-antiproton collisions at the Fermilab Tevatron using either polarized or unpolarized hadron beams. Standard model electroweak loops predict that the single-particle polarization of the top quark perpendicular to the scatter plane is small, yet at the Born level there are a number of double-spin polarization asymmetries which produce effects observable within the statistical errors expected from a thousand events.