Single top quarks at the Fermilab Tevatron

Abstract

We present a calculation of the single top quark cross section for proton-antiproton interactions with sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. We examine the effects of top mass, parton distribution functions, QCD scale, and collision energy, on each of the component production mechanisms, and study the kinematic distributions for standard model electroweak production. At the upgraded Tevatron with sqrt(s) = 2.0 TeV and high luminosity, it will be possible to test the nature of the Wtb coupling using single top production. We estimate the sensitivity to measure the single top cross section, and thus to directly measure V_tb and the top quark partial width. We show what happens to the V_tb measurement when an anomalous (V+A) component is added to the Wtb coupling, and how the top quark polarization affects the kinematic distributions.