Measurement of single top-quark production in association with a W boson in the single-lepton channel at $$\sqrt{s} = 8\,\text {TeV}$$ with the ATLAS detector
Abstract The production cross-section of a top quark in association with a W boson is measured using proton–proton collisions at $$\sqrt{s} = 8\,\text {TeV}$$ s = 8 TeV . The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of $$20.2\,\text {fb}^{-1}$$ 20.2 fb - 1 , and was collected in 2012 by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The analysis is performed in the single-lepton channel. Events are selected by requiring one isolated lepton (electron or muon) and at least three jets. A neural network is trained to separate the tW signal from the dominant $$t{\bar{t}}$$ t t ¯ background. The cross-section is extracted from a binned profile maximum-likelihood fit to a two-dimensional discriminant built from the neural-network output and the invariant mass of the hadronically decaying W boson. The measured cross-section is $$\sigma _{tW} = 26 \pm 7\,\text {pb}$$ σ tW = 26 ± 7 pb , in good agreement with the Standard Model expectation.