Top quark pair cross section measurement at ATLAS

Understand

An accurate determination of the top quark pair production cross section at the LHC provides a valuable check of the Standard Model.

• Given the high statistics which will be available (about one top quark pair per second, at a luminosity of 10^33 cm^-2 s^-1), this check can be performed relatively fast after the turn on of the LHC.
• The prospects for measuring the total top quark pair cross section with the ATLAS detector during the initial period of LHC running will be presented here.
• The cross section is determined in the single lepton channel and in the dilepton channel.