Measurement of the $t art$ production cross section in $p arp$ collisions at $sqrts$ = 1.96-TeV

Abstract

We measure the ttbar production cross section in ppbar collisions at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV in the lepton_s16jets channel. Two complementary methods discriminate between signal and background, b-tagging and a kinematic likelihood discriminant. Based on 0.9 fb-1 of data collected by the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, we measure sigma_ttbar=7.62_s16/-0.85 pb, assuming the current world average m_t=172.6 GeV. We compare our cross section measurement with theory predictions to determine a value for the top quark mass of 170_s16/-7 GeV.