This will be a required acquisition text for academic libraries. More than ten years after its discovery, still relatively little is known about the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle. This extensive survey summarizes and reviews top-quark physics based on the precision measurements at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, as well as examining in detail the sensitivity of these experiments to new physics. Finally, the author provides an overview of top quark physics at the Large Hadron Collider.

The discovery of the top quark in 1995 opened a whole new sector of investigation of the Standard Model; today top quark physics remains a key priority of the Tevatron program. Some of the measurements of top quark properties, for example its mass, will be a long-standing legacy. The recent evidence of an anomalously large charge asymmetry in top quark events suggests that new physics could couple preferably with top quarks. I will summarize this long chapter of particle physics history and discuss the road the top quark is highlighting for the LHC program.

The authors present recent preliminary measurements of the top-antitop pair production cross section and determinations of the top quark pole mass, performed using the data collected by the CDF and D0 Collaborations at the Tevatron Collider. In the lepton plus jets final state, with semileptonic B decay, the pair production cross section has now been measured at CDF using (almost equal to) 760 pb−1 of proton-antiproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of (square root)s = 1.96 TeV. A measurement of the production cross section has also been made with (almost equal to) 1 fb−1 of data in the all-jets final state by the CDF Collaboration. The mass of the top quark has now been measured using (almost equal to) 1 fb−1 of collision data using all decay channels of the top quark pair, yielding the most precise measurements of the top mass to date.

Run II of the Tevatron collider at Fermilab is well under way and data samples larger than those of Run I are at hand. In this contribution the author summarizes the current status of cross-section measurements for top-quark pair (t{bar t}) production at the CDF and D0 experiments.

This paper presents the latest measurements of the properties of the top quark as determined by the DØ and CDF collaborations at the Fermilab Tevatron p{anti p} Collider. Both experiments have studied the all-hadronic decay mode of t{anti t} events. The top quark mass measurement has been refined over the past year, with the addition of new channels and a re-evaluation of some of the earlier ones. There are recent studies of the mass of the t{anti t} system, the helicity of the W bosons in the top quark decays, and of the correlation of the spins of the top and antitop quarks. New results are also reported on searches for charged Higgs bosons in top quark decay, and for electroweak production of single top quarks.

Since the discovery of the top quark in 1995 by the CDF and D0 collaborations at the Fermilab Tevatron proton antiproton collider, precise measurements of its mass are ongoing. Using data recorded by the D0 and CDF experiment, corresponding to up to the full Tevatron data sample, top quark mass measurements performed in different final states using various extraction techniques are presented in this article. The recent Tevatron top quark mass combination yields m_t=173.20 +-0.87 GeV. Furthermore, measurements of the top antitop quark mass difference from the Tevatron are discussed.

The top quark, discovered in 1995 at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, is the heaviest known elementary particle. The precise knowledge of its mass yields important constraints on the mass of the as-yet-undiscovered Higgs boson and allows one to probe for physics beyond the Standard Model. With an excellent adaptation of a novel measurement technique, described and applied here for the first time, the sensitivity to the top quark mass in the dilepton final state at the D0 experiment could be improved by more than 30%. Moreover, an extension to the method is presented which allows future measurements to significantly reduce the main limiting systematic uncertainty.