Physical Society Colloquium

The Top Top Ten List

Michael E. Peskin

Stanford University

The top quark is the heaviest known quark. Because of the large mass of the top quark, our theory of weak interactions predicts for it a number of special properties that are not shared by lighter quarks, The large mass of the top quark also implies that it couples more strongly than other quarks to the particles responsible for the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the weak interactions. This implies that there can be signatures of new physics that are specific to top quark processes. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which has just begun operation, might produce 100,000 top quarks in its first year of running and will produce millions of top quarks even in its early stages. In this colloquium, I will review the standard and non-standard physics of the top quark. I will then present a list of the top ten top quark measurements that we will make at the LHC.