Exclusion of an Exotic Top Quark with -4/3 Electric Charge Using Soft Lepton Tagging

Abstract

We present a measurement of the electric charge of the top quark using pp̅ collisions corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.7 fb-1 at the CDF II detector. We reconstruct tt̅ events in the lepton+jets final state. We use soft lepton taggers to determine the flavor of the b jets, which we use to reconstruct the top quark’s electric charge and exclude an exotic top quark with -4/3 charge at 95% confidence level. This is the strongest exclusion of the exotic charge scenario and the first to use soft leptons for this purpose.