Top physics: measurement of the cross section for ttbar production in ppbar collisions using the kinematics of lepton + jets events

We present a measurement of the top pair production cross section in p{bar p} collisions at {radical}s = 1.96 TeV. We collect a data sample with an integrated luminosity of 194 {+-} 11 pb{sup -1} with the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. We use an artificial neural network technique to discriminate between top pair production and background processes in a sample of 519 lepton+jets events, which have one isolated energetic charged lepton, large missing transverse energy and at least three energetic jets. We measure the top pair production cross section to be {sigma}{sub t{bar t}} = 6.6 {+-} 1.1 {+-} 1.5 pb, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic