Measurement of the top pair production cross section in the lepton plus jets channel using a jet flavor discriminant

We present a new method to measure the top quark pair production cross section and the background rates with data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.7 fb(-1) from p (p) over bar collisions at root s = 1.96 TeV collected with the CDF II Detector. We select events with a single electron or muon candidate, missing transverse energy, and at least one b-tagged jet. We perform a simultaneous fit to a jet flavor discriminant across nine samples defined by the number of jets and b tags. An advantage of this approach is that many systematic uncertainties are measured in situ and inversely scale with integrated luminosity. We measure a top cross section of sigma(t (t) over bar) 7.64 +/- 0.57(stat + syst) +/- 0.45(luminosity) pb.