Searches for WZ and ZZ Diboson Production in Final States with Jets and Charged Leptons or Missing Transverse Energy at CDF

We present the results from two studies aimed at an experimental measurement of the WZ/ZZ diboson production in the leptons + jets final state using data recorded with the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. Because diboson production is topologically similar to associated Higgs production with a W or Z boson, searches for diboson production in partially hadronic decay channels offer a chance to develop and refine new analysis techniques that may aid in the discovery of the Higgs boson. We show the results of a search for WZ and ZZ production in events where there are at least two jets and a large transverse momentum imbalance. To improve our sensitivity, we employ a new artificial-neural-network ( ANN) based b tagger to identify jets likely originating from heavy-flavor quarks. We also show recent progress on a search for diboson production in the charged leptons and jets final state, where we select events by identifying those containing two charged leptons with a reconstructed invariant mass near the mass of the Z boson, at least two jets, and low transverse missing energy. Here we employ a new ANN based quark/gluon discriminant to reduce the contribution from our dominant background, Z + jets production.