Study of top-quark polarization in single-top-quark production at the CERN LHC

This paper complements the study of single top-quark production at the CERN LHC aiming to estimate the sensitivity of different observables to the magnitude of the effective couplings. In a previous paper the dominant W-gluon fusion mechanism was considered, while here we extend the analysis to the subdominant (10% with our set of experimental cuts) s-channel process. In order to distinguish left from right effective couplings it is required to consider polarized cross sections and/or include $m_b$ effects. The spin of the top quark is accessible only indirectly by measuring the angular distribution of its decay products. We show that the presence of effective right-handed couplings implies necessarily that the top quark is not in a pure spin state. We discuss to what extent quantum interference terms can be neglected in the measurement and therefore simply multiply production and decay probabilities classically. The coarsening involved in the measurement process makes this possible. We determine for each process the optimal spin basis where theoretical errors are minimized and, finally, discuss the sensitivity in the s channel to the effective right-handed coupling. The results presented here are all analytical and include $m_b$ corrections. They are derived within the narrow width approximation for the top quark.