Ttbar production cross section measurement in the muon plus jets channel using soft electron tagging in pp collisions at the center of mass nergy = 8 TeV

Abstract

A measurement is made of the top quark pair production cross section through the decay channel tt¯ → μν_μ + jets, carried out using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The top quark pair events were produced in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. To facilitate the detection of tt¯ events, jets produced from bottom quarks, which are decay products of the top quarks, are identified using electrons with low transverse momentum with respect to the beam axis (soft electrons). The dominant background, W + jets production, is estimated using the preferential production of W⁺ over W⁻ at the LHC. Techniques to measure or estimate the remaining backgrounds, and the identification efficiency of the soft electron technique are also discussed. The final result of this study is [special characters omitted]