Top quark pair production and decay at hadron colliders

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. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V All rights reserved.