Measurement of the front back asymmetry in top-antitop quark pairs produced in proton-antiproton collisions at center of mass energy = 1.96 TeV

Quarks, along with leptons and force carrying particles, are predicted by the Standard Model to be the fundamental constituents of nature. In distinction from the leptons, the quarks interact strongly through the chromodynamic force and are bound together within the hadrons. The familiar proton and neutron are bound states of the light ''up'' and ''down'' quarks. The most massive quark by far, the ''top'' quark, was discovered by the CDF and D0 experiments in March, 1995. The new quark was observed in p{bar p} collisions at 1.8 TeV at the Fermilab Tevatron. The mass of the top quark was measured to be 176 {+-} 13 GeV/c{sup 2} and the cross section 6.8{sub -2.4}{sup +3.6} pb. It is the Q = 2/3, T{sub 3} = +1/2 member of the third generation weak-isospin doublet along with the bottom quark. The top quark is the final Standard Model quark to be discovered. Along with whatever is responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking, top quark physics is considered one of the least understood sectors of the Standard Model and represents a front line of our understanding of particle physics. Currently, the only direct measurements of top quark properties come from the CDF and D0 experiments observing p{bar p} collisions at the Tevatron. Top quark production at the Tevatron is almost exclusively by quark-antiquark annihilation, q{bar q} {yields} t{bar t} (85%), and gluon fusion, gg {yields} t{bar t} (15%), mediated by the strong force. The theoretical cross-section for this process is {sigma}{sub t{bar t}} = 6.7 {+-} 0.8 pb for m{sub t} = 175 GeV/c{sup 2}. Top quarks can also be produced at the Tevatron via q{bar b}{prime} {yields} tb and qg {yields} q{prime}tb through the weak interaction. The cross section for these processes is lower (3pb) and the signal is much more difficult to isolate as backgrounds are much higher. The top quark is predicted to decay almost exclusively into a W-boson and a bottom quark (t {yields} Wb). The total decay width t {yields} Wb is {Lambda} = 1.50 GeV. This corresponds to an incredibly short lifetime of 0.5 x 10{sup -24} seconds. This happens so quickly that hadronization and bound states do not take place, which leads to the interesting consequence that the top quark spin information is passed to the decay products