Evidence for s-Channel Single-Top-Quark Production in Events with One Charged Lepton and Two Jets at CDF

We report evidence for $s$-channel single-top-quark production in proton-antiproton collisions at center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}= 1.96 \mathrm{TeV}$ using a data set that corresponds to an integrated luminosity of $9.4 \mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab. We select events consistent with the $s$-channel process including two jets and one leptonically decaying $W$ boson. The observed significance is $3.8$ standard deviations with respect to the background-only prediction. Assuming a top-quark mass of $172.5 \mathrm{GeV}/c^2$, we measure the $s$-channel cross section to be $1.41^{+0.44}_{-0.42} \mathrm{pb}$.