Plans for an early measurement of the ttbar cross section in the electron+jets channel at sqrt s = 10 TeV

We describe plans for a measurement of the $t\bar{t}$ cross section using semileptonic decays of top quark pairs in the electron channel that does not rely on b-tagging. Data-driven methods to estimate the contributions from QCD and W+jets background processes are presented. For QCD, we have explored a one-dimensional extrapolation method to estimate the QCD background using an electron isolation distribution. For W+jets, we have studied a template fit method using a discriminating variable. We demonstrate that given 20 pb$^{-1}$ of LHC collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 10 TeV, it is possible to measure the $t\bar{t}$ cross section with a statistical uncertainty of 23\%. The systematic uncertainty of this measurement is estimated to be 20\%.