Longitudinal contribution to the alignment polarization of quarks produced in e+ e−-annihilation: an O(αs) effect

We calculate the longitudinal contribution to the alignment polarization Pl of quarks produced in e+e− annihilation. In the Standard Model, the longitudinal alignment polarization vanishes at the Born term level and thus receives its first non-zero contribution from the O(αs) tree graph process. We provide analytical and numerical results for the longitudinal alignment polarization of massless and massive quarks, in particular for the recently discovered top quark.