Measurement of the top quark pair production cross section with ATLAS in pp collisions at = 7 TeV in the single-lepton channel using semileptonic b decays

Abstract

The cross section for top quark pair production in pp collisions at = 7 TeV is measured using data recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Events are selected requiring a single high transverse momentum isolated electron or muon, missing transverse momentum and jets. Semileptonic b decays are identified by a lower momentum muon close to a jet, leading to substantially different sources of systematic uncertainty compared with other measurements. With a data sample corresponding to 4.66 fb−1 of integrated luminosity, the top quark pair production cross section is measured to bein agreement with theoretical predictions based on perturbative QCD and with other measurements which used different techniques or decay channels.