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.

Twenty years after its discovery in 1995 by the CDF and D0 collaborations at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider at Fermilab, the top quark still undergoes intensive studies at the Tevatron and the LHC at CERN. In this article, recent top quark physics results from CDF and D0 are reported. In particular, measurements of single top quark and double top quark production, the $t\bar{t}$ forward-backward asymmetry and the top quark mass are discussed.

The authors review the field of top-quark physics with an emphasis on experimental techniques. The role of the top quark in the Standard Model of particle physics is summarized and the basic phenomenology of top-quark production and decay is introduced. They discuss how contributions from physics beyond the Standard model could affect the top-quark properties or event samples. The many measurements made at the Fermilab Tevatron, which test the Standard model predictions or probe for direct evidence of new physics using the top-quark event samples, are reviewed here.

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.

We review some of the latest results on W boson and top quark physics at the Tevatron and show prospects for Run IIa.