Angular analysis of bottom-flavored hadron production in semileptonic decays of polarized top quarks

We study the inclusive production of bottom-flavored hadrons from semileptonic decays of polarized top quarks at next-to-leading order in QCD using fragmentation functions recently determined from a global fit to e(+) e(-) data. We provide the relevant differential decay widths at parton level in analytic form. These results fill an important gap in the theoretical interpretation of recent measurements of the top-quark polarization and the t (t) over bar spin correlations using dilepton final states in proton-proton collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. As an illustration, we study the distributions in the scaled bottom-hadron energy of the polarized-top-quark decay widths for different W-boson helicities.

Automated summary

This study investigates the inclusive production of bottom-flavored hadrons from semileptonic decays of polarized top quarks at next-to-leading order in QCD. The results provide important insights for the theoretical interpretation of recent measurements of the top-quark polarization and spin correlations. Additionally, distributions in the scaled bottom-hadron energy of the polarized-top-quark decay widths for different W-boson helicities are analyzed as an illustration.