Measurements of the top-antitop production cross section at the Tevatron Run II CDF experiment using b-tagging

Abstract

We present measurements of the top-antitop production cross section in b-tagged lepton + jets events from proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV using the CDF detector at Fermilab. B-jets are tagged with either a secondary vertex algorithm, or a soft lepton tagger that identifies muons from B hadron semileptonic decays. With Tevatron Run II data, we estimate the top-antitop signal fraction in two different ways: by estimating the various background contributions, and by fitting directly the leading jet transverse energy spectrum for the signal and background contributions. A subset of the sample with two secondary vertex tagged jets yields a production cross section consistent with the inclusive measurements. Results are consistent with a Standard Model top-antitop signal and current measurements of the top quark mass.