Top Physics Capabilities at the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider will be considered a top factory, with about 8 million tt¯ events produced in the first year of running at low luminosity. This large data set will allow very precise measurements of the properties of the top quark which may also reveal new physics. The mass of the top quark will be measured with a precision of about 1 GeV/c2. The top quark Yukawa coupling should be determined with a precision of better than 10% for a Higgs mass of about 100 GeV/c2. tt¯ spin correlations will be observed and used to study anomalous couplings or CP violation. Possible heavy resonances decaying to tt¯ pairs will be detectable with masses up to 3 TeV/c2. Rare decays of the top quark with branching ratios as small as 10−5 will be seen. Finally, the detailed study of three different mechanisms of electroweak single top production will yield a wealth of information, including precision measurements of Vtb, W and top polarizations, and searches for anomalous couplings.