Parity violating asymmetries in top quark pair production at hadron colliders - art. no. 055009

We study loop-induced parity violating asymmetries in the strong production of polarized top quark pairs at pp and pp colliders. The electroweak O(alp ha) corrections to the helicity amplitudes of q (q) over bar --> t (t) over bar and gg --> t (t) over bar are evaluated in a two Higgs doublet model ( 2HDM) and the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). While observabl es in top quark pair production receive little contribution from standard e lectroweak interactions, it is possible that they can be significantly enha nced in a 2HDM and the MSSM. We find that the one-loop MSSM electroweak cor rections can generate parity violating asymmetries in the total production rate of left- and right-handed top quark pairs up to about 1.7% at the upgr aded Fermilab Tevatron (root S = 2 TeV) and 3% at the CERN LHC (root S = 14 TeV).