PT Journal
AU ATLAS Collaboration (Aad, Gea
   Alvarez Piqueras, D
   Cabrera Urban, S
   Castillo Gimenez, V
   Cerda Alberich, L
   Costa, MJ
   Fernandez Martinez, P
   Ferrer, A
   Fiorini, L
   Fuster, J
   Garcia, C
   Garcia Navarro, JE
   Gonzalez de la Hoz, S
   Hernandez Jimenez, Y
   Higon-Rodriguez, E
   Irles Quiles, A
   Jimenez Pena, J
   Kaci, M
   King, M
   Lacasta, C
   Lacuesta, VR
   Marti-Garcia, S
   Mitsou, VA
   Pedraza Lopez, S
   Perez Garcia-Estañ, MT
   Romero Adam, E
   Ros, E
   Salt, J
   Sanchez Martinez, V
   Soldevila, U
   Sanchez, J
   Valero, A
   Valls Ferrer, JA
   Vos, M
TI Evidence for single top-quark production in the s-channel in proton-proton collisions at root s=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector using the Matrix Element Method
SO Physics Letters B
JI Phys. Lett. B
PY 2016
BP 228
EP 246
VL 756
DI 10.1016/j.physletb.2016.03.017
LA English
AB 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 sigma s = 4.8 +/- 0.8(stat.)(-1.3)(+1.6)(syst.) pb, which is consistent with the Standard Model expectation. The expected significance for the analysis is 3.9 standard deviations.
ER