Abstract:

Electroweak production of the top quark has many attractive features. One is that the cross section is proportional to |Vtb|^2 and thus provides a test of the CKM matrix's 3-generation unitarity. The constraints on |Vtb| not assuming unitarity are weak. Another is that it provides a way to probe the V - A structure of the weak interaction. Because the top quark decays before it has time to hadronize, it retains its polarization information, making it available for study. Furthermore, because the top quark has such a large mass, close to the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking, one wonders if it has some special role in beyond the Standard Model physics. Studying the electroweak interaction in single top production is a good way to look for such beyond the Standard Model effects. In this seminar I will discuss the search for electroweak production of the top quark being undertaken by the D0 collaboration at Fermilab. I will discuss our selection criteria and background modeling, and I will focus in particular on the matrix element method analysis currently under way using 1 fb-1 of data.