Meenakshi  Narain, BU, 11 January 2007

Scientists of the DZero collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced in a seminar at Fermilab 
on December 8, 2006 the first evidence for single top quark production.
The top quark  was discovered in 1995, and still only very little is known experimentally about this elusive particle. It took about eleven years 
to observe its  production via the electroweak interaction, which is of extreme interest  because of its link to electroweak symmetry breaking. 
This production mode  allows us to directly probe the t-W-b vertex and hence it is also a good  way to look for effects beyond the Standard Model. 
I will present the details of the search methods which produced the recent evidence for electroweak  production of single top quarks. In the longer 
term, the techniques  employed in this analysis will allow us to search for an even more elusive particle, the Higgs boson.