Probing Higgs Boson - and Supersymmetry-Induced CP Violation

We consider, both for unpolarized and longitudinally polarized electron beams, the production of a top quark pair in e+e- collisions with subsequent semileptonic top and nonleptonic anti-top decay and vice versa and investigate optimized angular correlations which are sensitive to CP non-conservation in the top quark production vertex. We calculate these correlations for two-Higgs--doublet extensions and the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (SM) with CP violation beyond the Kobayashi-Maskawa phase. While the sensitivity of the optimal correlation for tracing dispersive CP effects is enhanced with longitudinally polarized electron beams, we find that the sensitivity of the best correlation for probing absorptive CP effects is almost independent of the polarization degree.