A Measurement Of The Top Antitop Production Cross Section In Proton Antiproton Collisions At Center Of Mass Energy

I present a measurement of the tt¯ production cross section at s = 1.96 TeV using 2034 pb-1 of CDF Run II data using events with a high transverse momentum electron or muon, three or more jets, and missing transverse energy. The measurement assumes a t → Wb branching fraction of 100 percent. Events consistent with tt¯ decay are found by identifying jets containing heavy-flavor semileptonic decays to muons. The dominant backgrounds are evaluated directly from the data. Based on 248 candidate events and an expected background of 86.8+/-5.6 events, I measure a production cross section of 8.7+/-1.1+0.9-0.8+/-0.6 pb, in agreement with the Standard Model.