Measurement of the cross-section for producing a $W$ boson in association with a single top quark in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}={13}$ TeV with ATLAS

TL;DR

This paper reports a measurement of the W boson and single top quark production cross-section in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV using ATLAS data, employing advanced analysis techniques to distinguish signal from background.

Contribution

It presents the first measurement of the Wt production cross-section at 13 TeV with detailed event selection and background discrimination methods.

Findings

Measured cross-section: 94 ± 10 (stat.) +28/-22 (syst.) ± 2 (lumi.) pb.

Result consistent with Standard Model prediction of 71.7 ± 3.4 pb.

Used boosted decision trees for signal-background separation.

Abstract

The inclusive cross-section for the associated production of a $W$ boson and top quark is measured using data from proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}={13}$ TeV. The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 3.2 fb$^{-1}$, and was collected in 2015 by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Events are selected requiring two opposite sign isolated leptons and at least one jet; they are separated into signal and control regions based on their jet multiplicity and the number of jets that are identified as containing $b$ hadrons. The $Wt$ signal is then separated from the $t\bar{t}$ background using boosted decision tree discriminants in two regions. The cross-section is extracted by fitting templates to the data distributions, and is measured to be $94 \pm 10$ (stat.)$^{+28}_{-22}$ (syst.) $\pm 2$ (lumi.) pb. The measurement is in agreement with the Standard Model prediction of $\sigma_{\mathrm{theory}} = 71.7 \pm 1.8\,(\mathrm{scale})\,\pm 3.4\,(\mathrm{PDF})\,\mathrm{pb}$.