Probing the flavor of the top quark decay

Abstract

The top quark sector is almost decoupled from lighter quark generations due to the fact that $V_{tb}\approx$~1. The current experimental measurements of $V_{tb}$ are compatible with the Standard Model expectations but are still dominated by experimental uncertainties. In this manuscript, a revision of the experimental methods used to measure $V_{tb}$ is given, and a simple method to probe heavy flavor content fraction of top quark events, $R=B(t\to Wb)/B(t\to Wq)$, is presented and discussed. Prospects for the measurements at the Large Hadron Collider based on generator level simulations are outlined.

The original method presented in this manuscript is partially described in "Probing the Heavy Flavor Content of Top quark events produced in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider with the CMS detector", Pedro Silva, PhD Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal (2009)