In the standard model, the polarization of $Z^0$, singly produced by arbitrarily polarized incident electron and positron beams, is obtained in a manifestly covariant way. It is shown that the vector polarization of $Z^0$ depends on the longitudinal polarization of the incident beams while the tensor polarization of $Z^0$ depends on both the transverse polarization and longitudinal polarization of the incident beams. We also obtain the polarization effects on the forward-backward asymmetry, the longitudinal asymmetry, and the final polarization of an outgoing fermion in the decay process $Z^0$→ff¯.

• Received 1 May 1985

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.33.1252