Benjamin Auerbach

We present a search for anomalous production of the signature lepton + photon + b-quark + missing transverse energy produced in proton-antiproton collisions at center of mass energy 1.96 TeV using 6.0 inverse fb of data taken with the CDF detector in Run II at the Tevatron. In addition to this signature-based search, we present a closely-related search for top pair production with an additional radiated photon. We find 85 events with a lepton, photon, missing transverse energy, and a b-quark versus an expectation of 99.1 ± 9.3 events. High-statistics control samples are used to evaluate a low-energy photon chi-squared cut. Additionally requiring the events to contain at least three jets, have a total transverse energy of 200 GeV, and that the photon candidate passes the chi-squared cut, we observe 30 radiative top pair candidate events versus an expectation from non-top Standard Model (SM) sources of 13.0 ± 2.1 Assuming the difference between the observed number and the predicted non-top SM total is due to top production, we measure the radiative top pair production cross section to be 0.18 ± 0.08 pb. We also measure the ratio of the radiative top pair production cross section to the top pair production cross section to be 0.024 ± 0.009, which compares well with a SM prediction of 0.024 ± 0.013.