Measurement of the top quark pair production cross section in proton-antiproton collisions at Vs=1.96 TeV : hadronic top decays with the d0 detector

Abstract

Of the six quarks in the standard model the top quark is by far the heaviest: 35 times more massive than its partner the bottom quark and more than 130 times heavier than the average of the other five quarks. Its correspondingly small decay width means it tends to decay before forming a bound state. Of all quarks, therefore, the top is the least affected by quark confinement, behaving almost as a free quark. Since in the standard model top quarks couple almost exclusively to bottom quarks (t ! Wb), top quark decays provide a window on the standard model through the direct measurement of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix element Vtb. In the same way any lack of top quark decays into W bosons could imply the existence of decay channels beyond the standard model, for example charged Higgs bosons as expected in two-doublet Higgs models: t ! H+b. This thesis sets out to measure the top-antitop quark pair production cross section at a center-of-mass energy of ps = 1:96 TeV in the fully hadronic decay channel. The analysis is performed on 1 fb1 of Tevatron Run IIa data taken with the D0 detector between July 2002 and February 2006. A neural network is used to identify jets from b-quarks and a likelihood ratio method is used to separate signal from background. To avoid reliance on, possibly imperfect, Monte Carlo models for the modelling of the QCD background, the background was modelled using a dedicated data sample. The tt signal was modelled using the alpgen and pythia Monte Carlo event generators. The generated signal sample was passed through the full, geant based, D0 detector simulation and reconstructed using the default D0 reconstruction software.