A Direct Measurement of the Total Decay Width of the Top Quark
Abstract
We present a measurement of the total decay width of the top quark using events with top-antitop-quark pair candidates reconstructed in the final state with one charged lepton and four or more hadronic jets. We use the full Tevatron Run II data set of s = 1.96 TeV proton-antiproton collisions recorded by the CDF II detector. The top-quark mass and the mass of the hadronically-decaying W boson are reconstructed for each event and compared with distributions derived from simulated signal and background samples to extract the top-quark width () and the energy scale of the calorimeter jets with in-situ calibration. For a top-quark mass = 172.5, we find 1.10<<4.05 at 68% confidence level, which is in agreement with the standard-model expectation of 1.3 and is the most precise direct measurement of the top-quark width to date.
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