PHYSICAL REVIEW D, PARTICLES, FIELDS, GRAVITATION, AND COSMOLOGY
Abstract
This article describes the current most precise measurement of the WZ production cross section as well as limits on anomalous WWZ couplings at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV in proton-antiproton collisions for the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). WZ candidates are reconstructed from decays containing three charged leptons and missing energy from a neutrino, where the charged leptons are either electrons or muons. Using data collected by the CDF II detector (7.1 fb(-1) of integrated luminosity), 63 candidate events are observed with the expected background contributing 8 +/- 1 events. The measured total cross section sigma(p (p) over bar -> WZ) = 3.93(-0.53)(+0.60)(stat)(-0.46)(+0.59)(syst) pb is in good agreement with the standard model prediction of 3.50 +/- 0.21. The same sample is used to set limits on anomalous WWZ couplings.