Minimal Flavour Violation and Anomalous Top Decays

Abstract

Top quark physics at the LHC may open a window to physics beyond the standard model and even lead us to an understanding of the phenomenon "flavour". However, current flavour data is a strong hint that no "new physics" with a generic flavour structure can be expected in the TeV scale. In turn, if there is "new physics" at the TeV scale, it must be "minimally flavour violating". This has become a widely accepted assumption for "new physics" models. In this paper we propose a model-independent scheme to test minimal flavour violation for the anomalous charged $Wtq$, $q\in{d,s,b}$, and flavour-changing $Vtq$, $q\in{u,c}$ and $V\in{Z,\gamma,g}$ couplings within an effective field theory framework, i.e., in a model-independent way. We perform a spurion analysis of our effective field theory approach and calculate the decay rates for the anomalous top-quark decays in terms of the effective couplings for different helicities by using a two-Higgs doublet model of type II, under the assumption that the top-quark is produced at a high-energy collision and decays as a quasi-free particle.