2013/04/20 by Joseph Boudreau, Boudreau, Joseph, Carlos Escobar +7
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #hep-ex
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1304.5639
26 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2013/04/20 · arxiv updated 2013/04/23
Since the discovery of parity violation in 1957, angular distributions of leptons coming from the weak decay of polarized fermions have been used to probe the structure of the Wqq' vertex. Vector and axial vector couplings reveal themselves in the angular distributions of both light and heavy polarized fermions, but tensor and pseudotensor couplings have a prominent influence on the angular distributions only for fermions heavier than the W boson; i.e. the top quark. The copious t-channel production of polarized single top quarks at the LHC provides an opportunity to study the angular distributions of leptons from polarized top quark decay. In this paper we develop formulae for differential rates intended to be used as a likelihood function in the simultaneous extraction of decay amplitudes, phases, and polarization. The incorporation of detector effects in these formulae is accomplished using a variant of the familiar convolution theorem applying to a decomposition of the differential rates in spherical harmonics.