Use and . A box Feynman diagram with two W bosons and internal up-type quarks changes one neutral flavour into the other. The top quark contribution dominates the dispersive mixing amplitude and carries the squared CKM combination involving . With a consistent meson phase convention,
The illustration in b shows this box and the dominant decay topology. A suitable common final state is , reconstructed for example through and . The leading tree transition gives , while the conjugate gives . Neutral kaon mixing projects both kaon flavours onto the observed .
The final state is approximately a CP eigenstate with : and each have CP approximately , and their relative orbital angular momentum is to couple the vector charmonium to the spin-zero parent. Neglecting the small kaon CP impurity and subleading decay amplitudes,
There are two indistinguishable paths, direct decay and mixing followed by decay, so their amplitudes interfere. For and negligible direct CP violation, the time-dependent neutral-B CP asymmetry is
Measure the production flavour and proper decay time, fit the oscillation coefficient, and extract . This determines up to the usual trigonometric ambiguities unless further information is used. The cancellation of the dominant decay phase is why this channel isolates the angle involving without needing .
In gluon-fusion Higgs production, two gluons couple to a closed top quark loop, and the Higgs boson couples to that massive quark through its Yukawa interaction. The right panel of the diagram in c shows one explicit colour-flow component: internal at one gluon insertion, then at the other; the colour-neutral Higgs boson insertion preserves the internal color charge. Include both loop orderings. The color charge factor is
so the two incoming gluons are projected onto a colour singlet. The Yukawa coupling is , and the vertex has strength . No direct tree-level mass coupling is needed. Integrating out a sufficiently heavy top quark generates an effective interaction proportional to , which is allowed by gauge invariance even though the gluon is massless.
There is also no kinematic obstacle: two massless particles with nonparallel momenta can have nonzero total invariant mass. In particular, head-on gluons have , providing the energy needed for the Higgs boson at the LHC.
Here , and the tree-level decay width neglects the bottom quark mass. The open two-body W channel gives a top quark lifetime of a few , shorter than the hadronization time. A fifth-power Sargent's rule extrapolation misses this physical regime.[ref]