Of the six quarks in the standard model the top quark is by far the heaviest: 35 times more massive than its partner the bottom quark and more than 130 times heavier than the average of the other five quarks. Its correspondingly small decay width means it tends to decay before forming a bound state. Of all quarks, therefore, the top is the least affected by quark confinement, behaving almost as a free quark. Its large mass also makes the top quark a key player in the realm of the postulated Higgs boson, whose coupling strengths to particles are proportional to their masses. Precision measurements of particle masses for e.g. the top quark and the W boson can hereby provide indirect constraints on the Higgs boson mass. Since in the standard model top quarks couple almost exclusively to bottom quarks (t {yields} Wb), top quark decays provide a window on the standard model through the direct measurement of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix element V{sub tb}. In the same way any lack of top quark decays into W bosons could imply the existence of decay channels beyond the standard model, for example charged Higgs bosons as expected in two-doublet Higgs …