ATLAS Search Strategy for Single Top Production

At the LHC, single top-quark events will be produced at a third of the rate of top-quark pairs. Single top-quark production proceeds through three different mechanisms, resulting in distinct final states, topologies and backgrounds. With this poster we present a strategy to search for the dominant t-channel process. The analysis was developed based on simulated events that represent collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of a few hundred 1/pb at a center-of-mass energy of 10 TeV. The analysis focuses on data-driven techniques to normalize the rates of the main backgrounds and calibrate predictions obtained from samples of simulated events. The selection of single top-quark events is optimized by the use of a likelihood method. The results show that already in the early phase of the LHC the sensitivity to the single top-quark t-channel process will be limited by systematic uncertainties, highlighting the importance of the control of the background-related uncertainties and the b-quark jet identification.