Leading Electroweak Corrections to the Production of Heavy Top Quarks at Hadron Colliders

Abstract

We calculate the electroweak corrections of the order $O({m_t^2\over v^2})$ to the QCD production of $t\bar{t}$ pairs via $q+qbar->t+tbar$ at hadron colliders and show that these corrections to the total production rate are small. This correction can be characterized as increasing the cross section most near the threshold region, where top quark signals are important, while the corrections become negative at higher $t\bar{t}$ energies where the top quark is a background for heavy Higgs boson searches or investigations involving the strongly interacting longitudinal $W$ system. The polarization of the $t\bar t$ pair is also discussed, including the effect that this has on proposed techniques for measuring the the top quark mass.