A search for single top-quark production via flavour-changing neutral current processes from gluon plus up- or charm-quark initial states in proton-proton collisions at the LHC is presented. Data collected with the ATLAS detector in 2012 at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb-1 are used. Furthermore, candidate events for a top quark decaying into a lepton, a neutrino and a jet are selected and classified into signal- and background-like candidates using a neural network.

We present a search for flavor changing neutral currents via quark-gluon couplings in a sample of single top quark final states corresponding to 2.3 fb−1 of integrated luminosity collected with the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. We select events containing a single top quark candidates with an additional jet, and obtain separation between signal and background using Bayesian neural networks. We find consistency between background expectation and observed data, and set limits on avor changing neutral current gluon couplings of the top quark to up quarks (tgu) and charm quarks (tgc). The cross section limits at the 95% C.L. are [sigma]{sub tgu}

This PhD thesis focuses on the search for flavor-changing neutral currents in the decay of a top quark to an up-type quark (q = u, c) and the Standard Model Higgs boson, where the Higgs boson decays to bb. Further, the thesis presents the combination of this search for top quark pair events with other ATLAS searches – in the course of which the most restrictive bounds to date on tqH interactions were obtained. Following on from the discovery of the Higgs boson, it is particularly important to measure the Yukawa couplings of the Standard Model fermions; these parameters may provide crucial insights to help solve the flavor puzzle and may help reveal the presence of new physics before it is directly observed in experiments.