Measurement of the ttbar production cross section in ppbar collisions using dilepton events

TL;DR

This paper measures the top-antitop quark pair production cross section in proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV using dilepton decay channels, providing a precise experimental result with multiple selection methods.

Contribution

It introduces a measurement of the ttbar production cross section using dilepton events with different selection criteria, including b-jet tagging, at Tevatron energies.

Findings

Measured cross section: 7.4 +/- 1.4 (stat) +/- 1.0 (syst) pb

Used approximately 425 pb-1 of data from the D0 detector

Applied four different event selection strategies

Abstract

We present a measurement of the ttbar pair production cross section in ppbar collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV utilizing approximately 425 pb-1 of data collected with the D0 detector. We consider decay channels containing two high pT charged leptons (either e or \mu) from leptonic decays of both top-daughter W bosons. These were gathered using four sets of selection criteria, three of which required that a pair of fully identified leptons (i.e., e\mu, ee, or \mu\mu) be found. The fourth approach imposed less restrictive criteria on one of the lepton candidates and required that at least one hadronic jet in each event be tagged as containing a b quark. For a top quark mass of 175 GeV, the measured cross section is 7.4 +/-1.4(stat} +/- 1.0(syst) pb.