First Observation of Vector Boson Pairs in a Hadronic Final State at the Tevatron Collider

Abstract

We present the first observation in hadronic collisions of the electroweak production of vector boson pairs (VV, V=W, Z) where one boson decays to a dijet final state. The data correspond to 3.5 fb(-1) of integrated luminosity of pp collisions at s=1.96 TeV collected by the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. We observe 1516 +/- 239(stat)+/- 144(syst) diboson candidate events and measure a cross section sigma(pp -> VV+X) of 18.0 +/- 2.8(stat)+/- 2.4(syst)+/- 1.1(lumi) pb, in agreement with the expectations of the standard model.