Measurement of the production cross-section of pair of top quarks in a final state with di-electrons in the data collected by D0 experiment in Run-IIa

Abstract

The top quark has been discovered in 1995 by CDF and D0 collaborations in proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron. The amount of data recorded by both experiments makes it possible to accurately measure the properties of this very massive quark. This thesis is devoted to the measurement of the top pair production cross-section via the strong interaction, in a final state composed of two electrons, two particle jets and missing transverse energy. It is based on a 1 fb-1 data set collected by the D0 experiment between 2002 and 2006. The reconstruction and identification of electrons and jets is of major importance in this analysis, and have been studied in events where a Z boson is produced together with one or more jets. The Z+jets process is indeed the dominant physics background to top pair production in the dielectron final state. The primary goal of this cross-section measurement is to verify Standard Model predictions. In this document, this result is also interpreted to indirectly extract the top quark mass. Moreover, the cross-section measurement is sensitive to new physics such as the existence of a charged Higgs boson. The selection established for the cross-section analysis has been used to search for a H+ boson lighter than the top quark, where the latter can decay into a W+ or H+ boson and a b quark. The model that has been studied makes the assumption that the H+ boson can only decay into a tau lepton and a neutrino.