SEARCH FOR THE TOP-QUARK IN THE HADRONIC DECAY CHANNEL

The possibility of discovering the top quark and measuring its mass at the Fermilab Tevatron collider is studied for the pure hadronic decay channel, that is, the six jet final state. The most important aspects of a generic detector relevant for this study are included. By requiring tagging of a b-quark jet and applying cuts on the sphericity, aplanarity, and summed scalar transverse energy of the jets we obtain an acceptable signal-to-background ratio. In order to reduce the uncertainty in the measured three jet invariant mass distribution due to energy smearing, kinematical fit techniques are used. With the above methods we conclude that a top quark with a mass up to 180 GeV can be observed in the hadronic decay mode at the Tevatron with an integrated luminosity of 100 pb(-1).