Observation of s -channel production of single top quarks at the tevatron

Abstract

We report the first observation of single-top-quark production in the s channel through the combination of the CDF and D0 measurements of the cross section in proton-antiproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. The data correspond to total integrated luminosities of up to 9.7fb-1 per experiment. The measured cross section is σs=1.29-0.24+0.26pb. The probability of observing a statistical fluctuation of the background to a cross section of the observed size or larger is 1.8×10-10, corresponding to a significance of 6.3 standard deviations for the presence of an s-channel contribution to the production of single-top quarks. © 2014 American Physical Society.