Investigation of Electroweak Production of the Top Quark at the LHC

This thesis presents a study of the prospects of measuring electroweak production of the top quark at the LHC. The study of the top quark is a highly topical subject as we expect significant numbers of top quarks at the LHC which will enable us to conduct precision measurements of the properties of the top. The t-channel ``single top'' is a relatively rare mode of top production but with it we can probe the spin structure of the Wtb vertex in the weak interaction at an unprecedented energy scale through the measurement of the top polarisation. Analysis strategies and computing tools were developed and tested extensively. The study was done using the signal and background events modelled with Monte Carlo generators, many of which have been newly developed for the LHC analysis. Full and fast simulation of the \ATLAS\ detector were performed to obtain realistic estimates of the sensitivity of the measurements. A new fully fledged analysis framework, ``\EventView'' was developed for the \ATLAS\ collaboration to process these data at the first level of analysis. Parameterised vertex tagging was used to estimate the level of background for this analysis and multi variable discriminant was constructed to reject them. A kinematic fit of the event reconstruction and a maximum likelihood fit were used for the precise extraction of the top polarisation. In the high energy hadronic environment at the LHC, the estimation of possible system atic errors, both experimental and theoretical, need to be carefully considered. Important elements of the systematic errors were investigated and the main contributions were evaluated.