First Measurement of the Production of a W Boson in Association with a Single Charm Quark in Proton Anti-proton Collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV

TL;DR

This paper reports the first measurement of the production cross section of a W boson with a single charm quark in proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV, using muon tagging and charge correlation techniques.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental measurement of W+c production cross section at Tevatron energies, confirming theoretical predictions.

Findings

Measured cross section: 9.8+/-3.2 pb

Agreement with theoretical expectations

First such measurement at Tevatron

Abstract

We present the first measurement of the production cross section of a W boson with a single charm quark (c) in p-pbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV, using soft muon tagging of c jets. In a data sample of ~1.8 fb-1, recorded with the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron, we select events with W+1 or 2 jets. We use the charge correlation between the W and the muon from the semileptonic decay of a charm hadron to extract the Wc signal. We measure sigma_{Wc}(p_{Tc}>20 GeV/c, |\eta_c|<1.5)\times BR(W->\ell\nu) = 9.8+/-3.2 pb, in agreement with theoretical expectations.