Angular analysis of bottom-flavored hadron production in semileptonic decays of polarized top quarks

Abstract

We study the inclusive production of bottom-flavored hadrons from semileptonic decays of polarized top quarks at next-to-leading order in QCD using fragmentation functions recently determined from a global fit to $e^+e^-$ data. We provide the relevant differential decay widths at parton level in analytic form. These results fill an important gap in the theoretical interpretation of recent measurements of the top-quark polarization and the $t\bar{t}$ spin correlations using dilepton final states in proton-proton collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. As an illustration, we study the distributions in the scaled bottom-hadron energy of the polarized-top-quark decay widths for different $W$-boson helicities.