Measurement of the ttbar Production Cross Section in ppbar Collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV using Soft Electron b-Tagging

TL;DR

This paper reports the first measurement of the top quark pair production cross section at Tevatron using soft electron b-tagging, achieving a value of 7.8 pb with associated uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of using soft electron tagging to identify heavy-flavor jets in top quark pair events at Tevatron.

Findings

Measured cross section: 7.8 pb

First use of soft electron tags in Run II

Background suppression via electron identification

Abstract

We present a measurement of the top quark pair production cross section in ppbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV using a data sample corresponding to 1.7/fb of integrated luminosity collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab. We reconstruct ttbar events in the lepton+jets channel. 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. We measure a production cross section of 7.8 +/- 2.4 (stat) +/- 1.6 (syst) +/- 0.5 (lumi) pb. This is the first measurement of the top pair production cross section with soft electron tags in Run II of the Tevatron.