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Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 201801 (2008) [7 pages]

Strong Evidence for ZZ Production in pp̅ Collisions at s=1.96  TeV

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T. Aaltonen et al. CDF Collaboration
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Received 1 February 2008; published 22 May 2008

We report the first evidence of Z boson pair production at a hadron collider with a significance exceeding 4 standard deviations. This result is based on a data sample corresponding to 1.9  fb-1 of integrated luminosity from pp̅ collisions at s=1.96  TeV collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab II detector. In the channel, we observe three ZZ candidates with an expected background of 0.096-0.063+0.092 events. In the νν channel, we use a leading-order calculation of the relative ZZ and WW event probabilities to discriminate between signal and background. In the combination of and νν channels, we observe an excess of events with a probability of 5.1×10-6 to be due to the expected background. This corresponds to a significance of 4.4 standard deviations. The measured cross section is σ(pp̅ →ZZ)=1.4-0.6+0.7(stat+syst)  pb, consistent with the standard model expectation.

© 2008 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.201801
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.201801
PACS:
12.15.Ji, 13.40.Em, 13.85.Qk, 14.70.Hp