Top Quark Interactions and the Search for New Physics

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 $V_L V_L \ra t\ov t$ or $t\ov b$ 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 $V_L V_L \ra V_L V_L$ scatterings. The effect on a CP-odd observable is also briefly discussed.