Prospects for the first Measurement of the ttbar Cross Section in the Muon plus Jets Channel at sqrt(s)=10 TeV with the CMS Detector

A feasibility study is presented of the first measurement of the $t\bar{t}$ pair production cross section in the muon-plus-jets channel at a center-of-mass energy of 10 TeV, using the CMS detector at the LHC. Events are selected which contain one highly energetic muon and at least four jets. Several techniques are used to identify the three jets originating from the hadronic top decay. The \ttbar cross section is extracted by means of template fits to discriminating distributions. The amount of QCD background is determined in a data-driven way using two complementary approaches. Statistical and systematical uncertainties are evaluated using ensemble tests. With $20\rm\ pb^{-1}$ of data, the \ttbar pair production cross section in the muon plus jets channel is expected to be measurable with 12-18\% statistical and 20-25\% systematic error, where the latter is dominated by the jet energy scale uncertainty.