Measurements of Single-Top Quark Production at the Tevatron

TL;DR

This paper reports on the measurement of single-top quark production cross sections at the Fermilab Tevatron, highlighting the experimental techniques used to distinguish signals from backgrounds and presenting evidence of single top production.

Contribution

It provides the first combined measurements of total and separate s- and t-channel single-top cross sections at the Tevatron using advanced analysis methods.

Findings

Evidence of single top production by CDF and D0 collaborations.

Measurement of total single-top cross section.

Separate measurements of s- and t-channel cross sections.

Abstract

The latest measurements of the cross sections for singly-produced top quarks at the Fermilab Tevatron are presented. The small expected signals and the large, uncertain backgrounds require careful event selection, sophisticated methods for separating signal events from background events, and data-based background predictions and fits. Both the CDF and D0 collaborations have solid evidence of single top production, using 2.7 fb-1 and 0.9 fb-1 of data, respectively. Both collaborations perform several analyses to measure the total single-top cross section sigma_s + sigma_t, as well as sigma_s and sigma_t separately.