Measurement of the production cross-section of a single top quark in association with a $Z$ boson in proton--proton collisions at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

The production of a top quark in association with a $Z$ boson is investigated. The proton--proton collision data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in 2015 and 2016 at a centre-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s} = 13 \mathrm{TeV}$ are used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $36.1 \mathrm{fb}^{-1}$. Events containing three identified leptons (electrons and/or muons) and two jets, one of which is identified as a $b$-quark jet are selected. The major backgrounds are diboson, $t\bar{t}$ and $Z\mathrm{+jets}$ production. A neural network is used to improve the background rejection and extract the signal. The resulting significance is $4.2\sigma$ in the data and the expected significance is $5.4\sigma$. The measured cross-section for $tZq$ production is $600 \pm 170 \mathrm{(stat.)} \pm 140 \mathrm{(syst.)} \mathrm{fb}$.