Measurement of the t(t)over-bar production cross section in 2 fb(-1) of p(p)over-bar collisions at root s = 1.96 TeV using lepton plus jets events with soft muon b tagging

Abstract

We present a measurement of the t (t) over bar production cross section in p (p) over bar collisions at root s = 1.96 TeV using events containing a high transverse momentum electron or muon, three or more jets, and missing transverse energy. Events consistent with t (t) over bar decay are found by identifying jets containing candidate heavy-flavor semileptonic decays to muons. The measurement uses a CDF run II data sample corresponding to 2 fb(-1) of integrated luminosity. Based on 248 candidate events with three or more jets and an expected background of 79.5 +/- 5.3 events, we measure a production cross section of 9.1 +/- 1.6 pb.