Evidence For S Channel Single Top Quark Production In Pbarp Collisions At Sqrts PDF Download

The author reports on the observation of electroweak production of single top quarks in p{bar p} collisions at (square root)s = 1.96 Tev using 2.3 fb−1 of data collected with the D0 detector at the fermilab Tevatron Collider. Using events containing an isolated electron or muon, missing transverse energy, two, three or four jets, with one or two of them identified as originating from the fragmentation of a b quark, the measured cross section for the process p{bar p} --> tb + X, tqb + X is 3.94 ± 0.88 pb (for a top quark mass of 170 GeV). 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. Using the same dataset, the measured cross sections for the t- and the s-channel processes when determined simultaneously with no assumption on their relative production rate are 3.14{sub -0.80}{sup +0.94} pb and 1.05 ± 0.81 pb respectively, consistent with standard model expectations. The measured t-channel cross section has a significance of 4.8 standard deviations, representing the first evidence for the production of an individual single top process to be detected.