Measurement of the inclusive and fiducial $t\bar{t}$ production cross-sections in the lepton+jets channel in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV with the ATLAS detector

TL;DR

This paper reports precise measurements of top-antitop quark pair production cross-sections in proton-proton collisions at 8 TeV using ATLAS data, employing data-driven background modeling and event region separation.

Contribution

The study introduces a data-driven approach to model W+jets background and constrains systematic uncertainties by event region separation, improving measurement precision.

Findings

Inclusive $t\bar{t}$ cross-section measured as 248.3 pb with 5.7% precision.

Fiducial $t\bar{t}$ cross-section measured as 48.8 pb with 4.5% precision.

Results agree with Standard Model predictions.

Abstract

The inclusive and fiducial $t\bar{t}$ production cross-sections are measured in the lepton+jets channel using 20.2 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Major systematic uncertainties due to the modelling of the jet energy scale and $b$-tagging efficiency are constrained by separating selected events into three disjoint regions. In order to reduce systematic uncertainties in the most important background, the W+jets process is modelled using Z+jets events in a data-driven approach. The inclusive $t\bar{t}$ cross-section is measured with a precision of 5.7% to be $\sigma_{\text{inc}}(t\bar{t})$ = 248.3 $\pm$ 0.7 (stat.) $\pm$ 13.4 (syst.) $\pm$ 4.7 (lumi.) pb, assuming a top-quark mass of 172.5 GeV. The result is in agreement with the Standard Model prediction. The cross-section is also measured in a phase space close to that of the selected data. The fiducial cross-section is $\sigma_{\text{fid}}(t\bar{t})$ = 48.8 $\pm$ 0.1 (stat.) $\pm$ 2.0 (syst.) $\pm$ 0.9 (lumi.) pb with a precision of 4.5%.