Baryon number violation at the LHC: The top option

Subject to strong experimental constraints at low energies, baryon number violation is nonetheless well motivated from a theoretical point of view. We examine the possibility of observing baryon-number-violating top-quark production or decay at hadron colliders. We adopt a model-independent effective approach and focus on operators with minimal mass dimension. Corresponding effective coefficients could be directly probed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) already with an integrated luminosity of 1 fb-1 at 7 TeV, and further constrained with 30(100) fb-1 at 7 (14) TeV