Cross-section measurement of single-top t-channel production at ATLAS

This study presents the cross-section measurement of electroweak single-top quark production in the t-channel with a semi-leptonically decaying top quark. The study is based on 4.7 fb^{-1} of proton-proton collision data recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in the year 2011. Selected events contain two highly energetic jets, one of which is identified as originating from a beauty quark, as well as a highly energetic electron or muon and transverse missing energy. The case of three and four jets is also considered but eventually discarded since their inclusion degrades the precision of the result. The event reconstruction is done with a chi-square-based kinematic fit using W boson and top quark mass constraints. The chi-square value in each event serves to classify the event as a signal-like or background-like process. The cross-section is extracted by performing a template-based maximum likelihood fit to the distribution that displays the best discriminatory power: This distribution is chosen such that the shape differences between signal and background with respect to the typical forward light jet kinematics of the t-channel are exploited. An observation of the single-top t-channel process with a significance of 5.7 Sigma is obtained, and the cross-section is measured to be 111^{+29}_{-28} pb. Assuming |Vtb|^{2} >> |Vtd|^{2} + |Vts|^{2} as well as a (V-A), CP-conserving interaction, and allowing for the presence of anomalous couplings at the W-t-b vertex, the associated value of the CKM matrix element times an anomalous form factor is determined as |Vtb*f^{L}_{1}| = 1.30^{+0.13}_{-0.16}. The corresponding lower limit in the standard model scenario 0 <= |Vtb| <= 1 amounts to 0.77 < |Vtb| at 95% confidence level.