Measurement of the tt̅ production cross section in pp̅ collisions at √s =1.8 TeV

Authors

T. Affolder, Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California
Kenneth A. Bloom, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Collider Detector at Fermilab Collaboration

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

8-1-2001

Comments

Published by American Physical Society. Phys. Rev. D 64, 032002 (2001). http://prl.aps.org. Copyright © 2001 American Physical Society. Permission to use.

Abstract

We update the measurement of the tt̅ production cross section using the CDF detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. This measurement uses tt̅ decays to the final states e+ν+jets and μ+ν+jets. We search for b quarks from t decays via secondary-vertex identification or the identification of semileptonic decays of the b and cascade c quarks. The background to the tt̅ production is determined primarily through a Monte Carlo simulation. However, we calibrate the simulation and evaluate its uncertainty using several independent data samples. For a top quark mass of 175 GeV/c², we measure σ _{t t}^¯=5.1±1.5 pb and σ _{t t}^¯=9.2±4.3 pb using the secondary vertex and the lepton tagging algorithms, respectively. Finally, we combine these results with those from other tt̅ decay channels and obtain σ _{t t}^¯=6.5_1.4 ^1.7 pb.