Measurement of the ttbar Production Cross Section in ppbar Collisions at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV using Lepton + Jets Events with Secondary Vertex b-tagging

TL;DR

This paper reports a measurement of the top-antitop quark pair production cross section in proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV, using lepton plus jets events with secondary vertex b-tagging, based on 162 pb-1 of data.

Contribution

It introduces a measurement technique for ttbar cross section using secondary vertex b-tagging in lepton+jets events at Tevatron energies.

Findings

Measured ttbar cross section: 5.6 pb with uncertainties.

Identified 48 candidate events with background estimate of 13.5 events.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of secondary vertex b-tagging for top quark studies.

Abstract

We present a measurement of the ttbar production cross section using events with one charged lepton and jets from ppbar collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. In these events, heavy flavor quarks from top quark decay are identified with a secondary vertex tagging algorithm. From 162 pb-1 of data collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab, a total of 48 candidate events are selected, where 13.5 +- 1.8 events are expected from background contributions. We measure a ttbar production cross section of 5.6^{+1.2}_{-1.1} (stat.) ^{+0.9}_{0.6} (syst.) pb.