Measurement of the Inclusive and Fiducial Cross-Section of Single Top-Quark $t$-Channel Events in $pp$ Collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 8 TeV

Abstract

This article presents the measurement of a $t$-channel single top-quark production fiducial cross-section in the lepton+jets channel with 20.3 fb${}^{-1}$ of 8 TeV data using a neural-network discriminant. A fiducial cross-section quoted within the detector acceptance of ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{fid}}=3.37\pm 0.05(stat.)\pm 0.47(syst.)\pm 0.09(lumi.)\text{pb}$ is obtained. The total inclusive $t$-channel cross-section is calculated using the acceptance predicted by various Monte Carlo generators. If the acceptance from the a MC@NLO + Herwig event generator is used, a value of ${\sigma }_t=82.6\pm 1.2(stat.)\pm 11.4(syst.)\pm 3.1(\mathrm{PDF})\pm 2.3(lumi.)\text{pb}$ is obtained, consistent with the Standard Model prediction. Using the ratio of the measured inclusive cross-section to the predicted cross-section and assuming that the top-quark-related CKM matrix elements obey the relation $|V_{tb}|\gg |V_{ts}|,|V_{td}|$, the coupling strength at the $W$-$t$-$b$ vertex is determined to be $|V_{tb}|=0.97_{-0.10}^{+0.09}$. Assuming that $|V_{tb}|\le 1$ a lower limit of $|V_{tb}|>0.78$ is obtained at the 95% confidence level.

4 pages, 3 figures, Top 2014 Conferencs Proceedings

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Parton Distribution Functions, ${\alpha }_s$ and Heavy-Quark Masses for LHC Run II