Saturday, March 03, 2012

Most Precise Measurement of W-boson Mass

While the Tevatron at Fermilab has gone into the collider heaven in the sky, none of us expects that we won't be hearing about its legacy well into the future. And this is one such example.

The DZero collaboration has reported the most precise measurement of the W-boson mass. This should have wide-ranging ramifications, including putting more constraints on the Higgs mass.

The CDF collaboration recently measured the W boson mass to be 80387 +/- 19 MeV/c2. The DZero collaboration measured the particle’s mass to be 80375 +-23 MeV/c2. The two new measurements, along with the addition of previous data from the earliest operation of the Tevatron, combine to produce a measurement of 80387 +- 17 MeV/c2, which has a precision of 0.02 percent.

I'm sure there will be more to come out of the retired "old lady".

Zz.

2 comments:

Pavel Murat said...

Dear ZZ, the CDF measurement, while using 2 times less statistics, is nevertheless more accurate than the D0 one.

Hengne Li said...

More accurate is true for CDF, but not 2 times less statistics. D0 uses only the electron channel, while CDF uses both the muon and electron channels which doubles (CDF's) statistics. The higher precision from CDF is what benefited from its better tracking system for lepton momentum measurement.