We report the first measurement of the cross section for Z
boson pair production at a hadron collider. This result is based on
a data sample corresponding to 1.9 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. In the l l l' l' channel, we observe
three ZZ candidates with an expected background of 0.096+0.092_-0.063
events. In the ll nu nu channels, we observe an excess of events with
a probability of 5.1 x 10-6 to be due to the expected background. This
corresponds to a significance of 4.4 standard deviations. The measured
cross section is sigma(p anti-p --> ZZ) = 1.4+0.7_-0.6(stat.+syst.) pb,
consistent with the standard model expectation.
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Updated: Friday, 2008 June 06 14:54:43 CDT automatically from input from carol picciolo