Observation of Single Top Quark Production at D0

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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.