In ongoing and upcoming hadron collider experiments, top quark physics will play an important role in testing the Standard Model and its possible extensions. In this work we present analytic results for the differential cross sections of top quark pair production in hadronic collisions at next-to-leading order in the QCD coupling, keeping the full dependence on the spins of the top quarks. These results are combined with the corresponding next-to-leading order results for the decay of polarized top quarks into dilepton, lepton plus jets, and all jets final states. As an application we predict double differential angular distributions which are due to the QCD-induced top quark spin correlations in the intermediate state. In addition to the analytic results, we give numerical results in terms of fit functions that can easily be used in an experimental analysis.

We study inclusive production of doubly heavy baryon at a collider and at hadron colliders through fragmentation. We study the production by factorizing nonpertubative- and perturbative effects. In our approach the production can be thought as a two-step process: A pair of heavy quarks can be produced perturbatively and then the pair is transformed into the baryon. The transformation is nonperturbative. Since a heavy quark moves with a small velocity in the baryon in its rest frame, we can use NRQCD to describe the transformation and perform a systematic expansion in the small velocity. At the leading order we find that the baryon can be formed from two states of the heavy-quark pair, one state is with the pair in 3S1 state and in color -3, another is with the pair in 1S0 state and in color 6. Two matrix elements are defined for the transformation from the two states, their perturbative coefficients in the contribution to the cross-section at a collider and to the function of heavy quark fragmentation are calculated. Our approach is different than previous approaches where only the pair in 3S1 state and in color -3 is taken into account. Numerical results for e+e− colliders at the two B-factories and for hadronic colliders LHC and Tevatron are given.

The quark recombination mechanism is proposed to explain the asymmetry between production rates of D+ and of D− in their inclusive productions, and also asymmetries for other charmed hadrons. These asymmetries are observed in experiment and are called as leading particle effects. In this work we give a general analysis for contributions of quark recombination to these asymmetries. The contributions consist of a perturbative- and nonperturbative part. We perform two types of factorization by considering the produced hadron with large transverse momentum and by taking charm quark as a heavy quark, respectively. In the case of large transverse momentum the effect of quark recombination is the standard twist-4 effect. We find that the contributions are parameterized with four nonperturbative functions, defined with four quark operators at twist-4, for initial hadrons without polarization. By taking charm quark as a heavy quark the factorization can be performed with the heavy quark effective theory(HQET). The effect of quark recombination is in general parameterized by eight nonperturbative parameters which are defined as integrals with matrix elements of four quark operators defined in HQET. For unpolarized hadrons in the initial state, the parameters can effectively be reduced to four. Perturbative parts in the two types of factorization are calculated at tree-level.

We present results for the differential distributions of jets from non-leptonic decays of polarized top quarks within the Standard Model, including QCD radiative corrections. Our work extends existing results which are only available for semileptonic top quark decays at the parton level. For t(↑) → b-jet +2 light jets we compute in particular the QCD-corrected top-spin analysing power of the b-quark jet and the least energetic light jet. The dependence of the results on the choice of the jet recombination scheme is found to be small. In addition we compute the spin analysing power of the thrust axis. Our results constitute a so far missing ingredient to analyse top quark production and subsequent non-leptonic decay at next-to-leading order in as, keeping the full information on the top quark polarization.

The collider experiments at the Tevatron and the LHC will allow for detailed investigations of the properties of the top quark. This requires precise predictions of the hadronic production of t t pairs and of their subsequent decays. In this Letter we present for the reactions p p, pp→tt+X →ℓ+ℓ−+X the first calculation of the dilepton angular distribution at next-to-leading order (NLO) in the QCD coupling, keeping the full dependence on the spins of the intermediate tt state. The angular distribution reflects the degree of correlation of the t and t spins which we determine for different choices of t and t spin bases. In the case of the Tevatron, the QCD corrections are sizeable, and the distribution is quite sensitive to the parton content of the proton.