Measurement of the tt-bar production cross section in pp-bar collisions at [sqrt]s=1.96  TeV using soft electron b-tagging

We present a measurement of the top-quark pair-production cross section in pp̅ collisions at [sqrt]s=1.96  TeV using a data sample corresponding to 1.7  fb-1 of integrated luminosity collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab. We reconstruct tt̅ events in the lepton+jets channel, consisting...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Paus, Christoph M. E., Choudalakis, Georgios, Gomez-Ceballos, Guillelmo, Goncharov, Maxim, Hahn, Kristian Allan, Henderson, C., Knuteson, Bruce O., Xie, Si, Bauer, Gerry P, Makhoul, Khaldoun
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2010
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/57491
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6047-4211
Description
Summary:We present a measurement of the top-quark pair-production cross section in pp̅ collisions at [sqrt]s=1.96  TeV using a data sample corresponding to 1.7  fb-1 of integrated luminosity collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab. We reconstruct tt̅ events in the lepton+jets channel, consisting of eν+jets and μν+jets final states. The dominant background is the production of W bosons in association with multiple jets. To suppress this background, we identify electrons from the semileptonic decay of heavy-flavor jets (“soft electron tags”). From a sample of 2196 candidate events, we obtain 120 tagged events with a background expectation of 51±3 events, corresponding to a cross section of σtt̅ =7.8±2.4(stat)±1.6(syst)±0.5(lumi)  pb. We assume a top-quark mass of 175  GeV/c2. This is the first measurement of the tt̅ cross section with soft electron tags in run II of the Tevatron.