Weak interaction corrections to hadronic top quark pair production

In this paper we determine the weak-interaction corrections of order αs α to hadronic top-quark pair production. First we compute the one-loop weak corrections to tt̄ production due to gluon fusion and the order αs α corrections to tt̄ production due to (anti)quark gluon scattering in the Standard Model. With our previous result [20] this yields the complete corrections of order αs α to gg, qq̄, qg, and q̄g induced hadronic tt̄ production with t and t̄ polarizations and spin-correlations fully taken into account. For the Tevatron and the LHC we determine the weak contributions to the transverse top-momentum and to the tt̄ invariant mass distributions. At the LHC these corrections can be of the order of 10 percent compared with the leading-order results, for large pT and Mtt̄ , respectively. Apart from parity-even tt̄ spin correlations we analyze also parity-violating double and single spin asymmetries, and show how they are related if CP invariance holds. For t (and t̄) quarks which decay semileptonically, we compute a resulting charged-lepton forward-backward asymmetry APV with respect to the t (t̄) direction, which is of the order of one percent at the LHC for suitable invariant-mass cuts. PACS number(s): 12.15.Lk, 12.38.Bx, 13.88.+e, 14.65.Ha