Measurement of the top-antitop production cross-section with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC

The top quark, discovered at the Tevatron ppbar collider in 1995, has been observed in pp collisions at the LHC by both the ATLAS and CMS experiments in 2010. The analysis developed by the candidate and presented in this thesis has been subject of the first publication of the ATLAS experiment on top quark physics: the measurement of the top-antitop (ttbar) total production cross-section. The analysis is here updated with the full 7 TeV pp collision data collected between August 2010 and August 2011. Final states containing one electron or muon, jets and missing energy are selected, requiring at least one of the jets to be tagged as coming from the hadronization of a b-quark. The cross-section is extracted using a counting method, for which an accurate background estimation is crucial. For this reason, the data-driven methods used to extract the main QCD and W+jets backgrounds are described and discussed. The results of the cross-section measurement using 2011 data are also used to derive an indirect measurement of the top quark mass. Analysing the data collected in 2010, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35 pb^(-1), a cross-section of: sigma(ttbar) = 156 +36 -30 pb is extracted, while with the 2.05 fb^(-1) of data analysed in 2011 a cross-section of: sigma(ttbar) = 164 +20 -17 pb is obtained. The latter result is used to extract the following top mass value: m(top,pole) = 173.3 +6.3 -6.0 GeV/c^2. The cross-section results are in good agreement with the theoretical predictions and with the other measurements done in ATLAS and CMS. The top mass obtained from this cross-section measurement agrees with the world average value.