Combination of ttbar cross section measurements and constraints on the mass of the top quark and its decays into charged Higgs bosons

Abstract

We combine measurements of the top quark pair production cross section in ppbar collisions in the l+jets, ll and tau-l final states (where l is an electron or muon) at a center of mass energy of sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV in 1fb^{-1} of data collected with the D0 detector. For a top quark mass of 170 GeV, we obtain sigma_ttbar=8.18^{+0.98}_{-0.87} pb. In addition, the ratios of ttbar cross sections in different final states are used to set upper limits on the branching fractions B(t -> H^{+}b -> tau nu b) and B(t -> H^{+}b -> c sbar b) as a function of charged Higgs boson mass. Based on predictions from higher order quantum chromodynamics, we extract a mass for the top quark from the combined ttbar cross section.