Measurement of the WW Cross Section in 7 TeV pp Collisions with the ATLAS Detector

Abstract

We report a measurement of the WW production cross section in pp collisions at 7 TeV. The WW leptonic decay channels are analyzed using data corresponding to 1.02 /fb of integrated luminosity collected by the ATLAS detector during 2011 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. With 414 observed WW candidate events and an estimated background of 170$\pm$28 events, the measured WW production cross section is $48.2 \pm 4.0 {\rm(stat)} \pm 6.4 {\rm(syst)} \pm 1.8 {\rm(lumi)}$ pb, in agreement with the Standard Model NLO prediction of 46$\pm$3 pb.