This will be a required acquisition text for academic libraries. More than ten years after its discovery, still relatively little is known about the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle. This extensive survey summarizes and reviews top-quark physics based on the precision measurements at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, as well as examining in detail the sensitivity of these experiments to new physics. Finally, the author provides an overview of top quark physics at the Large Hadron Collider.

The discovery of the top quark in 1995 opened a whole new sector of investigation of the Standard Model; today top quark physics remains a key priority of the Tevatron program. Some of the measurements of top quark properties, for example its mass, will be a long-standing legacy. The recent evidence of an anomalously large charge asymmetry in top quark events suggests that new physics could couple preferably with top quarks. I will summarize this long chapter of particle physics history and discuss the road the top quark is highlighting for the LHC program.

The authors present recent preliminary measurements of the top-antitop pair production cross section and determinations of the top quark pole mass, performed using the data collected by the CDF and D0 Collaborations at the Tevatron Collider. In the lepton plus jets final state, with semileptonic B decay, the pair production cross section has now been measured at CDF using (almost equal to) 760 pb−1 of proton-antiproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of (square root)s = 1.96 TeV. A measurement of the production cross section has also been made with (almost equal to) 1 fb−1 of data in the all-jets final state by the CDF Collaboration. The mass of the top quark has now been measured using (almost equal to) 1 fb−1 of collision data using all decay channels of the top quark pair, yielding the most precise measurements of the top mass to date.

The top quark, discovered in 1995 at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, is the heaviest known elementary particle. The precise knowledge of its mass yields important constraints on the mass of the as-yet-undiscovered Higgs boson and allows one to probe for physics beyond the Standard Model. With an excellent adaptation of a novel measurement technique, described and applied here for the first time, the sensitivity to the top quark mass in the dilepton final state at the D0 experiment could be improved by more than 30%. Moreover, an extension to the method is presented which allows future measurements to significantly reduce the main limiting systematic uncertainty.

Run II of the Tevatron collider at Fermilab is well under way and data samples larger than those of Run I are at hand. In this contribution the author summarizes the current status of cross-section measurements for top-quark pair (t{bar t}) production at the CDF and D0 experiments.

Since the discovery of the top quark in 1995 by the CDF and D0 collaborations at the Fermilab Tevatron proton antiproton collider, precise measurements of its mass are ongoing. Using data recorded by the D0 and CDF experiment, corresponding to up to the full Tevatron data sample, top quark mass measurements performed in different final states using various extraction techniques are presented in this article. The recent Tevatron top quark mass combination yields m_t=173.20 +-0.87 GeV. Furthermore, measurements of the top antitop quark mass difference from the Tevatron are discussed.

Discovered in 1995 by CDF and D0 at the Fermilab Tevatron collider, the top quark remains interesting to test the Standard Model. Having collected more than 7 fb−1 of integrated luminosity with both experiments until today, several top quark properties have been measured with increasing precision, while other properties have been investigated for the first time. In this article recent measurements of top quark properties from CDF and D0 are presented, using between 1 fb−1 and 4.8 fb−1 of data. In particular, the measurement of the top quark mass, the top quark width, the top antitop mass difference, a check of the electric charge of the top quark, measurements of the top antitop quark spin correlation and W helicity as well as a search for charged Higgs bosons are discussed.

An overview of the recent measurements of the top quark properties in proton antiproton collisions at √s = 1.96 TeV is presented. These measurements are based on 5.4-8.7 fb−1 of data collected with the D0 and CDF experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. The top quark mass and width measurements, studies of the spin correlation in top quark pair production, W boson helicity measurement, searches for anomalous top quark couplings and Lorentz invariance violation are discussed.

The top quark is by far the heaviest known fundamental particle with a mass nearing that of a gold atom. Because of this strikingly high mass, the top quark has several unique properties and might play an important role in electroweak symmetry breaking—the mechanism that gives all elementary particles mass. Creating top quarks requires access to very high energy collisions, and at present only the Tevatron collider at Fermilab is capable of reaching these energies. Until now, top quarks have only been observed produced in pairs via the strong interaction. At hadron colliders, it should also be possible to produce single top quarks via the electroweak interaction. Studies of single top quark production provide opportunities to measure the top quark spin, how top quarks mix with other quarks, and to look for new physics beyond the standard model. Because of these interesting properties, scientists have been looking for single top quarks for more than 15 years. This thesis presents the first discovery of single top quark production. It documents one of the flagship measurements of the D0 experiment, a collaboration of more than 600 physicists from around the world. It describes first observation of a physical process known as “single top quark production”, which had been sought for more than 10 years before its eventual discovery in 2009. Further, his thesis describes, in detail, the innovative approach Dr. Gillberg took to this analysis. Through the use of Boosted Decision Trees, a machine-learning technique, he observed the tiny single top signal within an otherwise overwhelming background. This Doctoral Thesis has been accepted by Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.