Measurement of the top quark mass with a matrix element method in the lepton plus jets channel at CDF

The authors present a measurement of the mass of the top quark from p{bar p} collisions at 1.96 TeV observed with the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) at the Fermilab Tevatron Run II. The events have the decay signature of p{bar p} {yields} t{bar t} in the lepton plus jets channel in which at least one jet is identified as coming from a secondary vertex and therefore a b-hadron. The largest systematic uncertainty, the jet energy scale (JES), is convoluted with the statistical error using an in-situ measurement of the hadronic W boson mass. They calculate a likelihood for each event using leading-order t{bar t} and W+jets cross-sections and parameterized parton showering. The final measured top quark mass and JES systematic is extracted from a joint likelihood of the product of individual event likelihoods. From 118 events observed in 680 pb{sup -1} of data, they measure a top quark mass of 174.09 {+-} 2.54 (stat+JES) {+-} 1.35(syst) GeV/c{sup 2}.