Measurement of the electroweak top quark production cross section and the CKM matrix element Vtb with the D0 experiment

At particle accelerators the Standard Model has been tested and will be tested further to a great precision. The data analyzed in this thesis have been collected at the world's highest energetic-collider, the Tevatron, located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) in the vicinity of Chicago, IL, USA. There, protons and antiprotons are collided at a center-of-mass energy of {radical}s = 1.96 TeV. The discovery of the top quark was one of the remarkable results not only for the CDF and D0 experiments at the Tevatron collider, but also for the Standard Model, which had predicted the existence of the top quark because of symmetry arguments long before already. Still, the Tevatron is the only facility able to produce top quarks. The predominant production mechanism of top quarks is the production of a top-antitop quark pair via the strong force. However, the Standard Model also allows the production of single top quarks via the electroweak interaction. This process features the unique opportunity to measure the |V{sub tb}| matrix element of the Cabbibo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix directly, without assuming unitarity of the matrix or assuming that the number of quark generations is three. Hence, the measurement of the cross section of more » electroweak top quark production is more than the technical challenge to extract a physics process that only occurs one out of ten billion collisions. It is also an important test of the V-A structure of the electroweak interaction and a potential window to physics beyond the Standard Model in the case where the measurement of |V{sub tb}| would result in a value significantly different from 1, the value predicted by the Standard Model. At the Tevatron two production processes contribute significantly to the production of single top quarks: the production via the t-channel, also called W-gluon fusion, and the production via the s-channel, known as well as W* process. This analysis searches for the combined s+t channel production cross section, assuming the ratio of s-channel production over t-channel production is realized in nature as predicted by the Standard Model. A data set of approximately 1 fb{sup -1} is analyzed, the data set used by the D0 collaboration to claim evidence for single top quark production. Events with two, three, and four jets are used in the analysis if they contain one or two jets that were tagged as originating from the decay of a b hadron, an isolated muon or electron, and a significant amount of missing transverse energy. This selection of events follows the signature that the single top quark events are expected to show in the detector. In the meantime, both collaborations D0 and CDF have analyzed a larger data set and have celebrated the joint observation of single top quark production. The novelty of the analysis presented here is the way discriminating observables are determined. A so-called Multi-Process Factory evaluates each event under several hypotheses. A common analysis technique for example in top quark properties studies is to reconstruct the intermediate particles in the decay chain of the signal process from the final state objects measured in the various subdetectors. An essential part of such a method is to resolve the ambiguities that arise in the assignment of the final state objects to the partons of the decay chain. In a Multi-Process Factory this approach is extended and not only the decay chain of the signal process is reconstructed, but also the decay chains of the most important background processes. From the numerous possible event configurations for each of the signal and background decay chains the most probable configuration is selected based on a likelihood measure. Properties of this configuration, such as mass of the reconstructed top quark, are then used in a multivariate analysis technique to separate the expected signal contribution from the background processes. The technique which is used is called Boosted Decision Trees and has only recently been introduced in high energy physics analyses. A Bayesian approach is used to finally extract the cross section from the discriminant output of Boosted Decision Trees. « less