Observation of Diboson Production in a Semileptonic Decay at CDF

TL;DR

This paper reports the first observation of WW+WZ diboson production in a semileptonic decay channel at the CDF experiment, confirming the standard model prediction with high statistical significance.

Contribution

It presents the first observation of WW+WZ production in a semileptonic channel at a hadron collider, using matrix element techniques for background separation.

Findings

Observation with 5.4σ significance

Measured cross section of 17.7 pb in agreement with SM

Used matrix element calculations for signal extraction

Abstract

We present the first observation of WW+WZ production in the channel with an identified lepton and two jets in 2.7 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity collected with the CDF II detector in $p\bar{p}$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 1.96$ TeV. The signal is separated from the large background using matrix element calculations and is observed with a significance of 5.4$\sigma$. The WW+WZ production cross section is measured to be $17.7 \pm 3.1$(stat)$\pm 2.4$(sys) pb, in good agreement with standard model predictions. A complimentary measurement using a fit to the dijet mass is also presented.