Determining spin dependent gluon distributions from top quark pair production at the LHC

Inclusive top quark pair production at the LHC proceeds primarily via gluon fusion. Decays of the polarized top pairs through various particle and jet channels have strong angular dependences reflecting the top and anti-top polarizations that produce a variety of correlations among the decay products - particles and jets. Those correlations are determined by the spin dependent gluon distributions from the unpolarized colliding protons. Combinations of the gluon distributions, either polarized or unpolarized, can be accessed experimentally through angular dependences of top decay products, as will be shown, along with preliminary predictions from a model of gluon distributions.