Measurements of the Top Anti-Top Production Cross Section and Top Quark Mass in the Hadronically Decaying Tau + Jets Decay Channel at CDF

Abstract

In this thesis, we present the first exclusive observation of the t-t → hadronic τ + jets decay channel. Using these events, we measure the t-t pair production cross section and the top quark mass in 2.2 fb-1 of data collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). The Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab provides collisions of protons and anti-protons at a center-of-mass energy of √s = 1.96 TeV and is one of only two accelerators in the world with enough energy to produce top quarks. With a branching fraction of nearly 10%, the hadronic τ + jets decay channel is the third largest t-t decay mode, and it has only been minimally explored. This the first measurement of the t-t pair production cross section in this decay channel at CDF and the first measurement of the top quark mass in this decay channel in the world. The analysis introduces a new method to recover the total momentum of the ν produced in the τ decay and an artificial neural network to reduce the contribution from the largest background source, QCD multijet background. The t-t pair production cross section is extracted by minimizing a negative log likelihood function which compares themore » number of observed events to the number of expected events for a given t-t cross section. The top quark mass is extracted by minimizing a negative log likelihood function built from signal and ii background probabilities which are based on the matrix elements for t-t production and decay and W + 4 parton production, respectively. Using events selected with exactly 1 hadronically decaying τ, exactly 4 jets with at least 1 identified as having originated from a b quark, and large missing transverse energy, we measure the t-t pair production cross section to be 8.8 ± 3.3 (stat.) ± 2.2 (syst.) pb and the top quark mass to be 172.7±9.3 (stat.) ±3.7 (syst.) GeV. We find both values to be in good agreement with previous measurements in other t-t decay channels, and the cross section to be consistent with next-to-leading order theoretical predictions.« less