We thank the Fermilab staff and the technical staffs of the participating institutions for their vital contributions. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation; the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare; the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; the National Science Council of the Republic of China; the Swiss National Science Foundation; the A.P. Sloan Foundation; the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Germany; the Korean Science and Engineering Foundation and the Korean Research Foundation; the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Royal Society, UK; the Institut National de Physique Nucleaire et Physique des Particules/CNRS; the Russian Foundation for Basic Research; the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, and Programa Consolider-Ingenio 2010, Spain; the Slovak R&D Agency; and the Academy of Finland.

We present a search for associated production of the standard model Higgs boson and a Z boson where the Z boson decays to two leptons and the Higgs decays to a pair of b quarks in p (p) over bar collisions at the Fermilab Tevatron. We use event probabilities based on standard model matrix elements to construct a likelihood function of the Higgs content of the data sample. In a CDF data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2: 7 fb(-1) we see no evidence of a Higgs boson with a mass between 100 GeV=c(2) and 150 GeV/c(2). We set 95% confidence level upper limits on the cross section for ZH production as a function of the Higgs boson mass m(H); the limit is 8.2 times the standard model prediction at m(H) 115 GeV/c(2).

Peer reviewed