Professor Daniela Bortoletto

Abstract:

We present a measurement of the tt̄ production cross section in pp̄ collisions at s=1.96TeV using events containing a high transverse momentum electron or muon, three or more jets, and missing transverse energy. Events consistent with tt̄ decay are found by identifying jets containing candidate heavy-flavor semileptonic decays to muons. The measurement uses a CDF run II data sample corresponding to 2fb-1 of integrated luminosity. Based on 248 candidate events with three or more jets and an expected background of 79.5±5.3 events, we measure a production cross section of 9.1±1.6pb. © 2009 The American Physical Society.

Abstract:

A search for new physics using three-lepton (trilepton) data collected with the CDF II detector and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 976 pb-1 is presented. The standard model predicts a low rate of trilepton events, which makes some supersymmetric processes, such as chargino-neutralino production, measurable in this channel. The μμ+ signature is investigated, where ℓ is an electron or a muon, with the additional requirement of large missing transverse energy. In this analysis, the lepton transverse momenta with respect to the beam direction (pT) are as low as 5GeV/c, a selection that improves the sensitivity to particles that are light as well as to ones that result in leptonically decaying tau leptons. At the same time, this low-pT selection presents additional challenges due to the non-negligible heavy-quark background at low lepton momenta. This background is measured with an innovative technique using experimental data. Several dimuon and trilepton control regions are investigated, and good agreement between experimental results and standard-model predictions is observed. In the signal region, we observe one three-muon event and expect 0.4±0.1μμ+ events from standard-model processes. © 2009 The American Physical Society.

Abstract:

We present a measurement of the ratio of the tt̄ production cross section via gluon-gluon fusion to the total tt̄ production cross section in pp̄ collisions at s=1.96TeV at the Tevatron. Using a data sample with an integrated luminosity of 955pb-1 recorded by the CDF II detector at Fermilab, we select events based on the tt̄ decay to lepton+jets. Using an artificial neural network technique we discriminate between tt̄ events produced via qq̄ annihilation and gg fusion, and find Gf=σ(gg→tt̄)/ σ(pp̄→tt̄)<0.33 at the 68% confidence level. This result is combined with a previous measurement to obtain the most stringent measurement of this quantity by CDF to date, Gf=0.07-0.07+0.15. © 2009 The American Physical Society.