Electroweak corrections to the toponium decay width

Abstract

We discuss one-loop electroweak corrections to the decay width of toponium. We calculate the energy-level shifts by expanding around the solution of the Bethe-Salpeter equation in the instantaneous approximation, in analogy with the positronium case. We show that first-order electroweak effects are suppressed by at least four powers of the strong coupling constant, and are therefore negligible compared with QCD corrections. The calculation is manifestly gauge invariant and takes into account the contributions to the decay rate due to both Coulomb enhancement and phase space reduction effects.