TOP SEARCHES AND R-PARITY VIOLATION AT HADRON COLLIDERS

In R(p)-violating supersymmetric theories there are new two-body top quark decays which can substantially suppress the branching fraction of the Standard Model process t --> bW+ --> bl+ nu(l). With some choices of the dominant R(p)-violating operator the CDF top-quark mass bound can be lowered below the LEP bound. With other choices, however, leptonic signals from top decay become much stronger; in such scenarios the bounds on the top-quark mass become more stringent than the Standard Model bounds. In future top-quark searches R(p)-violating decays could lead to the most prominent signals.