Measurement of the inclusive t(t)over-bar production cross section in the lepton plus jets channel in pp collisions at ?s=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector using support vector machines

Abstract

A measurement of the top quark pair-production cross section in the lepton + jets decay channel is presented. It is based on 4.6 fb(-1) of root s = 7 TeV pp collision data collected during 2011 by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. A three-class, multidimensional event classifier based on support vector machines is used to differentiate t (T) over bar events from backgrounds. The tt production cross section is found to be sigma(t (t) over bar) = 168.5 +/- 0.7(stat)(-5.9)(+6.2) (syst)(-3.2)(+3.4) (lumi) pb. The result is consistent with the Standard Model prediction based on QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order.