Abstract : In the Standard Model, the top quark plays a unique role as the heaviest known fundamental particle and as a quark that decays before it is able to hadronize. Top quarks are expected to decay to a W-boson and a b-quark nearly 100% of the time. If the branching ratio of t → Wb is lower than one, the distribution of the number of b-tagged jets will shift to lower multiplicities. A simultaneous likelihood fit to the number of b-tagged jets distributions in the lepton+jets and dilepton channels is performed on 4.7 fb−1 of data collected by the ATLAS detector to extract both the branching ratio and the tt ̄ cross section. The branching ratio of t → Wb, R, is measured to be 1.06±0.11, which is consistent with the Standard Model value. This is the first measurement of the t → Wb branching ratio performed with the ATLAS detector using both the lepton+jets and dilepton channels at the LHC. The tt ̄ cross section is measured to be [special characters omitted] pb, which agrees with NNLO predictions.

Before any kind of new physics discovery could be made at the LHC, a precise understanding and measurement of the Standard Model of particle physics' processes was necessary. The book provides an introduction to top quark production in the context of the Standard Model and presents two such precise measurements of the production of top quark pairs in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV that were observed with the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC. The presented measurements focus on events with one charged lepton, missing transverse energy and jets. Using novel and advanced analysis techniques as well as a good understanding of the detector, they constitute the most precise measurements of the quantity at that time.