Observation of s-channel production of single top quarks at the Tevatron

We report the first observation of single-top-quark production in the s channel through the combination of the CDF and D0 measurements of the cross section in proton-antiproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. The data correspond to total integrated luminosities of up to 9.7 fb−1 per experiment. The measured cross section is σs=1.29+0.26−0.24 pb. The probability of observing a statistical fluctuation of the background to a cross section of the observed size or larger is 1.8×10−10, corresponding to a significance of 6.3 standard deviations for the presence of an s-channel contribution to the production of single-top quarks.