Measurement of the Production Cross-Section of a Single Top Quark in Association with a W Boson at 8 TeV with the ATLAS Experiment

The cross-section for the production of a single top quark in association with a W boson in proton-proton collisions at √s̅ = 8 TeV is measured. The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb⁻¹, collected by the ATLAS detector in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Events containing two leptons and one central b-jet are selected. The W t signal is separated from the backgrounds using boosted decision trees, each of which combines a number of discriminating variables into one classifier. Production of W t events is observed with a significance of 7.7σ. The cross-section is extracted in a profile likelihood fit to the classifier output distributions. The W t cross-section, inclusive of decay modes, is measured to be 23.0 ± 1.3(stat.) {⁻3.5}^{+3.2}(syst.) ± 1.1(lumi.) pb. The measured cross-section is used to extract a value for the CKM matrix element |V{tb}| of 1.01 ± 0.10 and a lower limit of 0.80 at the 95% confidence level. The cross-section for the production of a top quark and a W boson is also measured in a fiducial acceptance requiring two leptons with p_T > 25 GeV and |η| < 2.5, one jet with p_T > 20 GeV and |η| < 2.5, and E_T ^{miss} > 20 GeV, including both Wt and top-quark pair events as signal. The measured value of the fiducial cross-section is 0.85 ± 0.01(stat.)_{-0.07} ^{+ 0.07} (syst.) ± 0.03(lumi.) pb.