Measurement of ttbar Spin Correlation in ppbar Collisions Using the CDF II Detector at the Tevatron

The ttbar spin correlation at production is a fundamental prediction of QCD and a potentially incisive test of new physics coupled to top quarks. We measure the ttbar spin state in ppbar collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV using 1001 candidate events in the lepton plus jets decay channel reconstructed in the CDF II detector. In the helicity basis, for a top-quark mass of 172.5 GeV/c^2, we find a spin correlation coefficient kappa = 0.60 +/- 0.50 (stat) +/- 0.16 (syst), consistent with the QCD prediction, kappa ~= 0.40.