Single top quark production at LHC with anomalous Wtb couplings Original Research Article

We investigate single top production in the presence of anomalous Wtb couplings. We explicitly show that, if these couplings arise from gauge invariant effective operators, the only relevant couplings for single top production and decay are the usual image and image terms, where q is the W boson momentum. This happens even in the single top production processes where the Wtb interaction involves off-shell top and/or bottom quarks. With this parameterisation for the Wtb vertex, we obtain expressions for the dependence on anomalous couplings of the single top cross sections, for (i) the t-channel process, performing a matching between tj and image production, where j is a light jet; (ii) s-channel image production; (iii) associated image production, including the correction from image. We use these expressions to estimate, with a fast detector simulation, the simultaneous limits which the measurement of single top cross sections at LHC will set on image and possible anomalous couplings. Finally, a combination with top decay asymmetries and angular distributions is performed, showing how the limits can be improved when the latter are included in a global fit to Wtb couplings.