Observation of Single Top-Quark Production

Authors

V. M. Abazov, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia
Kenneth A. Bloom, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Gregory Snow, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
D0 Collaboration

Date of this Version

2009

Comments

Published in Physical Review Letters 103, 092001 (2009). Copyright © 2009 The American Physical Society. Used by permission.

Abstract

We report observation of the electroweak production of single top quarks in pp collisions at √s = 1.96 TeV based on 2.3 fb^-1 of data collected by the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. Using events containing an isolated electron or muon and missing transverse energy, together with jets originating from the fragmentation of b quarks, we measure a cross section of σ(pp → tb + X, tqb + X) = 3.94 ± 0.88 pb. The probability to measure a cross section at this value or higher in the absence of signal is 2.5 x 10^-7, corresponding to a 5.0 standard deviation significance for the observation.