We present a new method to measure the top quark pair production cross section and the background rates with data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $2.7{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ from $p\overline{p}$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=1.96\mathrm{TeV}$ collected with the CDF II Detector. We select events with a single electron or muon candidate, missing transverse energy, and at least one $b$-tagged jet. We perform a simultaneous fit to a jet flavor discriminant across nine samples defined by the number of jets and $b$ tags. An advantage of this approach is that many systematic uncertainties are measured in situ and inversely scale with integrated luminosity. We measure a top cross section of ${\sigma }_{t\overline{t}}=7.64\pm 0.57(\mathrm{stat}+\mathrm{syst})\pm 0.45(\mathrm{\text{luminosity}})\mathrm{pb}$.

• Received 24 March 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.84.031101