UC Santa Cruz

This paper presents a direct measurement of the decay width of the top quark using tt¯$$t\bar{t}$$ events in the lepton+jets final state. The data sample was collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC in proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.2 fb-1$$^{-1}$$. The decay width of the top quark is measured using a template fit to distributions of kinematic observables associated with the hadronically and semileptonically decaying top quarks. The result, Γt=1.76±0.33(stat.)-0.68+0.79(syst.)GeV$$\Gamma _t = 1.76 \pm 0.33~(\text {stat.})~ ^{+0.79}_{-0.68}~(\text {syst.})~\text {GeV}$$ for a top-quark mass of 172.5 GeV, is consistent with the prediction of the Standard Model.