Measurement of the top quark mass using the invariant mass of lepton pairs in soft muon b-tagged events

Abstract

We present the first measurement of the mass of the top quark in a sample of t (t) over bar -> l (nu) over barb (b) over barq (q) over bar events (where l = e, mu) selected by identifying jets containing a muon candidate from the semileptonic decay of heavy-flavor hadrons (soft muon b tagging). The p (p) over bar collision data used correspond to an integrated luminosity of 2 fb(-1) and were collected by the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. The measurement is based on a novel technique exploiting the invariant mass of a subset of the decay particles, specifically the lepton from the W boson of the t -> Wb decay and the muon from a semileptonic b decay. We fit template histograms, derived from simulation of t (t) over bar events and a modeling of the background, to the mass distribution observed in the data and measure a top quark mass of 180.5 +/- 12.0(stat) +/- 3.6(syst) GeV/c(2), consistent with the current world average value.