Top Quarks at the Tevatron : Measurements of the Top Quark Production and Decay with the D0 Experiment

This thesis presents two measurements of the top quark using 230 pb-1 of data taken with the D0 detector at the Tevatron accelerator. The first measurement determines the top pair production cross section at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV in proton-antiproton collisions. In the standard model of particle physics the top quark decays almost exclusively into a W boson and a b quark. Candidate events are selected by requiring that at least one jet in the event is tagged with the secondary vertex algorithm. The measured top pair production cross section is: 8.6 +1.6-1.5 (stat. + syst.) +- 0.6 (lumi.) pb. The second measurement uses the observed and predicted number of events with 0, 1 and 2 b-tagged jets to estimate the ratio R: R = B(t->Wb) / B(t->Wq) where q stands for any down-type quark. The measured value is R = 1.03 +0.19-0.17 (stat. + syst.) in good agreement with the standard model prediction of R=1. The result can be used to obtain a lower limit for R: R > 0.61 (95% C.L.)