Abstract
Lepton pairs with invariant masses M( l + l −) < M Z originate in p̄p collisions from two competitive sources: the Drell-Yan process and the associated production of heavy quarks followed by their semileptonic decay. We show that cuts required for lepton/hadron separation in the detectors suppress cc̄, bb̄ events, and that it is possible to obtain a clean Drell-Yan lepton-pair sample with a small tt̄ “background”. However the tt̄ signal can be easily isolated by specializing to e μ pairs or by requiring that the leptons are acollinear in the transverse plane. As the proposed heavy quark signature involves only charged leptons, it is at least as “clean” as the W → t b ̄ signature, although the predicted event rate (conservatively based on QCD fusion only) is somewhat less.
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