Abstract:

On March 4th, 2009, the Tevatron collider program at Fermilab achieved an important milestone with the simultaneous observation of electroweak single top quark production by the CDF and D0 collaborations. In this talk, I will focus on the CDF analyses that achieved this observation, almost 14 years to the day of the first top quark discovery in 1995 (which identified top quark pairs produced through the strong force). The weak production mode opens an alternative source of top quarks that is experimentally very challenging to isolate from large background processes but allows the direct determination of top quark properties like the CKM matrix element |Vtb| and the top quark polarization.