Measurement of the Single Top Quark Production Cross Section and |Vtb| in Events with One Charged Lepton, Large Missing Transverse Energy, and Jets at CDF

We report a measurement of single top quark production in proton-antiproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of \sqrt{s} = 1.96 TeV using a data set corresponding to 7.5 fb-1 of integrated luminosity collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab. We select events consistent with the single top quark decay process t \to Wb \to l{\nu}b by requiring the presence of an electron or muon, a large imbalance of transverse momentum indicating the presence of a neutrino, and two or three jets including at least one originating from a bottom quark. An artificial neural network is used to discriminate the signal from backgrounds. We measure a single top quark production cross section of 3.04+0.57-0.53 pb and set a lower limit on the magnitude of the coupling between the top quark and bottom quark |Vtb| > 0.78 at the 95% credibility level.
Comment: Version appearing in Physical Review Letters