Measurement of single top-quark production in association with a $W$ boson in the single-lepton channel at $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract: The production cross-section of a top quark in association with a $W$ boson is measured using proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV. The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.2 fb$^{-1}$, and was collected in 2012 by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The analysis is performed in the single-lepton channel. Events are selected by requiring one isolated lepton (electron or muon) and at least three jets. A neural network is trained to separate the $tW$ signal from the dominant $t\bar{t}$ background. The cross-section is extracted from a binned profile maximum-likelihood fit to a two-dimensional discriminant built from the neural-network output and the invariant mass of the hadronically decaying $W$ boson. The measured cross-section is $\sigma_{tW} = 26 \pm 7$ pb, in good agreement with the Standard Model expectation.