Measurement of the Top Quark Mass Using the Invariant Mass of Lepton Pairs in Soft Muon b-tagged Events

We present the first measurement of the mass of the top quark in a sample of $t\bar{t}\to \mathrm{\ell }\bar{\nu }b\bar{b}q\bar{q}$ events (where $\mathrm{\ell }=e$, $\mu$) selected by identifying jets containing a muon candidate from the semileptonic decay of heavy-flavor hadrons (soft muon $b$-tagging). The $p\bar{p}$ collision data used corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 2 fb${}^{-1}$ and was collected by the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. The measurement is based on a novel technique exploiting the invariant mass of a subset of the decay particles, specifically the lepton from the $W$ boson of the $t\to Wb$ decay, and the muon from a semileptonic $b$ decay. We fit template histograms, derived from simulation of $t\bar{t}$ events and a modeling of the background, to the mass distribution observed in the data and measure a top quark mass of $180.5\pm 12.0(\mathrm{s}\mathrm{t}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{t}\mathrm{.})\pm 3.6(\mathrm{s}\mathrm{y}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{t}\mathrm{.})\mathrm{G}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{V}\mathrm{/}{c}^2$, consistent with the current world average.