Measurement of the tttt production cross section in pp collisions at sqrt s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A measurement of four-top-quark production using proton–proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb −1 is presented. Events are selected if they contain a single lepton (electron or muon) or an opposite-sign lepton pair, in association with multiple jets. The events are categorised according to the number of jets and how likely these are to contain 𝑏-hadrons. A multivariate technique is then used to discriminate between signal and background events. The measured four-top-quark production cross section is found to be 26 +17 −15 fb, with a corresponding observed (expected) significance of 1.9 (1.0) standard deviations over the background-only hypothesis. The result is combined with the previous measurement performed by the ATLAS Collaboration in the multilepton final state. The combined four-top-quark production cross section is measured to be 24 +7 −6 fb, with a corresponding observed (expected) signal significance of 4.7 (2.6) standard deviations over the background-only predictions. It is consistent within 2.0 standard deviations with the Standard Model expectation of 12.0 ± 2.4 fb.