  We present a study of electroweak production of top and antitop quarks in the
s-channel mode at the LHC, including next-to-leading order (NLO) quantum
chromodynamics (QCD) corrections to the production and decay of the single
(anti)top quark. The spin is preserved in production and decay by using the
narrow width approximation for the (anti)top quark. We show the effect of
different O(alpha_s) contributions on the inclusive cross section and various
kinematic distributions at parton level after imposing relevant kinematic cuts
to select s-channel single top quark events. We also discuss several
possibilities for measuring the top quark polarization.
