Measurement of the ttbar production cross section in ppbar collisions at sqrt{s} = 1.96 TeV using kinematic characteristics of lepton + jets events

We present a measurement of the top quark pair production cross section in ppbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV utilizing 425 pb-1 of data collected with the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. We consider the final state of the top quark pair containing one high-pT electron or muon and at least four jets. We exploit specific kinematic features of ttbar events to extract the cross section. For a top quark mass of 175 GeV, we measure sigma_ttbar = 6.4 +1.3-1.2(stat} +/- 0.7(syst)+/- 0.4(lum) pb in good agreement with the standard model prediction.