Measurement of the ttbar production cross section in ppbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV using events with large missing transverse energy and jets

In this paper we report a measurement of the ttbar production cross section in ppbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.2fb-1 collected with the CDF II detector at the Tevatron accelerator. We select events with significant missing transverse energy and high jet multiplicity. This measurement vetoes the presence of explicitly identified electrons and muons, thus enhancing the tau contribution of ttbar decays. Signal events are discriminated from the background using a neural network, and heavy flavor jets are identified by a secondary-vertex tagging algorithm. We measure a ttbar production cross section of 7.99 +/- 0.55(stat) +/- 0.76(syst) +/- 0.46(lumi) pb, assuming a top mass m_top = 172.5 GeV/c^2, in agreement with previous measurements and standard model predictions.