Measurement of the production cross section for single top quarks in association with W bosons in proton-proton collisions at $$ \sqrt{s}=13 $$ TeV

Abstract

A bstract A measurement is presented of the associated production of a single top quark and a W boson in proton-proton collisions at $$ \sqrt{s}=13 $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msqrt> <mml:mi>s</mml:mi> </mml:msqrt> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>13</mml:mn> </mml:math> TeV by the CMS Collaboration at the CERN LHC. The data collected corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb −1 . The measurement is performed using events with one electron and one muon in the final state along with at least one jet originated from a bottom quark. A multivariate discriminant, exploiting the kinematic properties of the events, is used to separate the signal from the dominant $$ \mathrm{t}\overline{\mathrm{t}} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>t</mml:mi> <mml:mover> <mml:mi>t</mml:mi> <mml:mo>¯</mml:mo> </mml:mover> </mml:math> background. The measured cross section of 63 . 1 ± 1 . 8(stat) ± 6 . 4(syst) ± 2 . 1 (lumi) pb is in agreement with the standard model expectation.