Measurement of spin correlation between top and antitop quarks produced in pp¯ collisions at s=1.96 TeV

We present a measurement of the correlation between the spins of t   and t¯ quarks produced in proton–antiproton collisions at the Tevatron Collider at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. We apply a matrix element technique to dilepton and single-lepton+jets final states in data accumulated with the D0 detector that correspond to an integrated luminosity of 9.7 fb−19.7 fb−1. The measured value of the correlation coefficient in the off-diagonal basis, Ooff=0.89±0.22(stat+syst), is in agreement with the standard model prediction, and represents evidence for a top–antitop quark spin correlation difference from zero at a level of 4.2 standard deviations.