Measurement of the Single Top Quark Cross Section in the Lepton Plus Jets Final State in Proton-Antiproton Collisions at a Center of Mass Energy of 1.96 TeV Using the CDF II Detector

Abstract

We present a measurement of the single top quark cross section in the lepton plus jets final state using an integrated luminosity corresponding to 7.5 fb-1 of p\bar p collision data collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab. The single top candidate events are identified by the signature of a charged lepton, large missing transverse energy, and two or three jets with at least one of them identified as originating from a bottom quark. A new Monte Carlo generator POWHEG is used to model the single top quark production processes, which include s-channel, t-channel, and Wt-channel. A neural network multivariate method is exploited to discriminate the single top quark signal from the comparatively large backgrounds. We measure a single top production cross section of $3.04^{+0.57}_{-0.53} (\mathrm{stat.~+~syst.})$ pb assuming $m_{\rm top}=172.5$~GeV/$c^2$. In addition, we extract the CKM matrix element value $|V_{tb}|=0.96\pm 0.09~(\mathrm{stat.~+~syst.})\ ± 0.05~(\mathrm{theory})$ and set a lower limit of $|V_{tb}|>0.78$ at the 95% credibility level.