Studies of top quark production at D0
I present recent results on top quark production in pp collisions at a center of mass energy of 1.96 TeV. The studies were performed by the D0 collaboration using approximately 5 fb{sup -1} of data taken during Run II at the Fermilab Tevatron accelerator. The top quark is the heaviest known elementary particle and completes the quark sector of the three-generation structure of the standard model (SM). It differs from the other quarks not only by its much larger mass, but also by its lifetime which is too short to build hadronic bound states. The SM predicts that top quarks are created via two independent production mechanisms at hadron colliders. The primary mode, in which a t{bar t} pair is produced from a gtt vertex via the strong interaction, was used by the D0 and CDF collaborations to establish the existence of the top quark in 1995. The second production mode of top quarks at hadron colliders is the electroweak production of a single top quark from a Wtb vertex. The predicted cross section for single top quark production is about half that of t{bar t} pairs but the signal-to-background ratio is much worse; observation of single top quark production has therefore until recently been impeded by its low rate and difficult background environment compared to the top pair production. In the following sections I will present results for the measurement of the t{bar t} pair and the single top quark production cross section using respectively 5.3 fb{sup -1} and 5.4 fb{sup -1} of data taken by the D0 experiment.
- Research Organization:
- Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-07CH11359
- OSTI ID:
- 1021479
- Report Number(s):
- FERMILAB-CONF-11-314-E-PPD; TRN: US1103995
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Presented at 19th International Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects (DIS 2011), Newport News, Virginia, 11-15 Apr 2011
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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