We report the first observation of the associated production of a
W boson and a Z boson. This result is based on 1.1 fb-1 of integrated
luminosity from p anti-p collisions at s**(1/2) = 1.96 TeV collected with the CDF
II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. We observe 16 WZ candidates passing
our event selection with an expected background of 2.7 +/- 0.4 events. A
fit to the missing transverse energy distribution indicates an excess of
events compared to the background expectation corresponding to a
significance equivalent to six standard deviations. The measured cross
section is sigma(p anti-p --> WZ) = 5.0+1.8_-1.6 pb, consistent with the
standard model expectation.
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Updated: Wednesday, 2007 May 02 11:05:35 CDT automatically from input from Carol Picciolo