Measurement of the top pair-production cross section in the dilepton channel in proton-antiproton collisions at a center of mass energy = 1.96 TeV

The top quark was discovered by CDF and D0 in 1995, in Tevatron Run I. This thesis presents the results of the top production cross-section measurement in the dilepton channel, using data taken at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) in pp¯ collisions, at a center-of-mass energy of s = 1.96 TeV. The dataset represents an integrated luminosity of 193 pb-1 and was collected between the period March 2002--September 2003. Thirteen events were observed (1 e/e, 9 e/mu, 3 mu/mu), passing the selection requirements, with an estimated background of 2.8 +/- 0.7 events. These are used to measure a tt¯ cross-section of sigmatt¯ = 8.4+3.2-2.7 (stat) +1.5-1.1 (syst) +/- 0.5 (lum)pb. This is in a good agreement with the Standard Model prediction of sigmatt¯ = 6.7+0.71-0.88 pb, for a top quark mass of 175 GeV/c2. Also a few kinematical distributions are compared with the Standard Model and found to agree well.