Strong evidence for ZZ production in pp collisions at √s=1.96 TeV

We report the first evidence of Z boson pair production at a hadron collider with a significance exceeding 4 standard deviations. This result is based on a data sample corresponding to 1.9 fb(-1) of integrated luminosity from pp collisions at root s=1.96 TeV collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab II detector. In the lll'l' channel, we observe three ZZ candidates with an expected background of 0.096(-0.063)(+0.092) events. In the ll nu nu channel, we use a leading-order calculation of the relative ZZ and WW event probabilities to discriminate between signal and background. In the combination of lll'l' and 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(pp -> ZZ)=1.4(-0.6)(+0.7)(stat+syst) pb, consistent with the standard model expectation.