Measurement of the t(bar t) Production Cross Section in p(bar p) Collisions at √(s)=1.96 TeV using Soft Electron b-Tagging

We present a measurement of the top quark pair production cross section in p(bar p) collisions at √s = 1.96 TeV using a data sample corresponding to 1.7 fb-1 of integrated luminosity collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab. We reconstruct t(bar t) events in the lepton+jets channel, consisting of eν+jets and μν+jets final states. The dominant background is the production of W bosons in association with multiple jets. To suppress this background, we identify electrons from the semileptonic decay of heavy-flavor jets ('soft electron tags'). From a sample of 2196 candidate events, we obtain 120 tagged events with a background expectation of 51 ± 3 events, corresponding to a cross section of σtbart = 7.8 ± 2.4 (stat) ± 1.6 (syst) ± 0.5 (lumi) pb. We assume a top-quark mass of 175 GeV/c2. This is the first measurement of the t(bar t) cross section with soft electron tags in Run II of the Tevatron.