Evidence for single top-quark production in the s-channel in proton–proton collisions at √s=8TeVwith the ATLAS detector using the Matrix Element Method

Aad, G; Abbott, B; Abdallah, J; Abdinov, O; Aben, R; Abolins, M; AbouZeid, O S; Abramowicz, H; Abreu, H; Abreu, R; Abulaiti, Y; Acharya, B S; Adamczyk, L; Adams, D L; Adelman, J; Adomeit, S; Adye, T; Affolder, A A; Agatonovic-Jovin, T; Agricola, J; Aguilar-Saavedra, J A; Ahlen, S P; Ahmadov, F; Aielli, G; Akerstedt, H; Åkesson, T P A; Akimov, A V; Alberghi, G L; Albert, J; Albrand, S; Alconada Verzini, M J; Aleksa, M

Evidence for single top-quark production in the s-channel in proton–proton collisions at √s=8TeVwith the ATLAS detector using the Matrix Element Method

Journal Article

2016

Journal Title

Physics Letters, B

Link to Journal

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2016.03.017

Department

Department of Physics

Faculty

Faculty of Science

Abstract

This Letter presents evidence for single top-quark production in the s-channel using proton– proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The analysis is performed on events containing one isolated electron or muon, large missing transverse momentum and exactly two b-tagged jets in the final state. The analysed data set corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb−1 . The signal is extracted using a maximum-likelihood fit of a discriminant which is based on the matrix element method and optimized in order to separate single-top-quark s-channel events from the main background contributions, which are top-quark pair production and W boson production in association with heavy-flavour jets. The measurement leads to an observed signal significance of 3.2 standard deviations and a measured cross-section of σs = 4.8±0.8(stat.)+1.6 −1.3 (syst.) pb, which is consistent with the Standard Model expectation. The expected significance for the analysis is 3.9 standard deviations.