Abstract:
We present the first measurement of the production cross section of a $W$ boson with a single charm quark (c) in $p\barp$ collisions at $\sqrts=1.96$ TeV, using soft muon tagging of c jets. In a data sample of ~1.8 fb-1, recorded with the Collider Detector at Fermilab II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron, we select events with W+1 or 2 jets. We use the charge correlation between the $W$ and the muon from the semileptonic decay of a charm hadron to extract the Wc signal. We measure sigmaWc(pTc>20 GeV/c,|etac|[script-l]nu)=9.8\pm 3.2 pb, in agreement with theoretical expectations.