Measurement of the inclusive Formula Presented production cross section in the lepton+jets channel in pp collisions at Formula Presented 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 s = 7 TeV p p 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 ¯ events from backgrounds. The t t ¯ production cross section is found to be σ t t ¯ = 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.