Top quark physics in hadron collisions

The top quark is the heaviest elementary particle observed to date. Its large mass makes the top quark an ideal laboratory to test predictions of perturbation theory concerning heavy quark production at hadron colliders. The top quark is also a powerful probe for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. In addition, the top quark mass is a crucial parameter for scrutinizing the SM in electroweak precision tests and for predicting the mass of the yet unobserved Higgs boson. Ten years after the discovery of the top quark at the Fermilab Tevatron, top quark physics has entered an era where detailed measurements of top quark properties are undertaken. In this paper an introduction to the phenomenology of top quark production in hadron collisions is given, the lessons learned in Tevatron Run I are summarized and the first Run II results are discussed. A brief outlook of the possibilities of top quark research at the Large Hadron Collider, currently under construction at CERN, is included.