Observation of Single Top Quark Production at D0

Abstract

This paper presents the observation of the electroweak production of single top quarks in the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. Events containing an isolated electron or muon and missing transverse energy, together with jets originating from the fragmentation of b quarks are used to measure a cross section for single top quark production of sigma(ppbar -> 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 2.5X10^-7, corresponding to a 5.0 standard deviation significance.