Measurement of the inclusive tt^- production cross section in the lepton + jets channel in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector using support vector machines

A measurement of the top quark pair-production cross section in the lepton+jets decay channel is presented. It is based on 4.6  fb⁻¹ of √𝑠 = 7  TeV 𝑝⁢𝑝 collision data collected during 2011 by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. A three-class, multidimensional event classifier based on support vector machines is used to differentiate tt¯events from backgrounds. The 𝑡⁢𝑡¯production cross section is found to be 𝜎𝑡⁢t = 168.5 ± 0.7⁢(stat)⁢ ^+6.2_−5.9⁢(syst)⁢ ^+3.4_−3.2⁢(lumi)  pb. The result is consistent with the Standard Model prediction based on QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order.