Observation Of Single Top Quark Production At The Tevatron

This paper reports on the first observation of electroweak production of single top quarks by the D0 and CDF collaborations. At Fermilab's 1.96 TeV proton-antiproton collider, a few thousand events are selected from several inverse femtobarns of data that contain an isolated electron or muon and/or missing transverse energy, together with jets that originate from the decays of b quarks. Using sophisticated multivariate analyses to separate signal from background, the D0 collaboration measures a cross section [sigma] (p{bar p} → tb + X, tqb + X) = 3.94 ± 0.88 pb (for a top quark mass of 170 GeV) and the CDF collaboration measures a value of 2.3{sub -0.5}{sup +0.6} pb (for a top quark mass of 175 GeV). These values are consistent with theoretical predictions at next-to-leading order precision. Both measurements have a significance of 5.0 standard deviations, meeting the benchmark to be considered unambiguous observation.