Direct Measurement of the W Boson Width in pp̅ Collisions at √s = 1.8 TeV

Authors

T. Affolder, Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California
Kenneth A. Bloom, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Collider Detector at Fermilab Collaboration

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

10-16-2000

Comments

Published by American Physical Society. Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 3347 (2000). http://prl.aps.org. Copyright © 2000 American Physical Society. Permission to use.

Abstract

This Letter describes a direct measurement of the W boson total decay width, Γ _W, using the Collider Detector at Fermilab. The measurement uses an integrated luminosity of 90 pb^-1, collected during the 1994–1995 run of the Fermilab Tevatron pp̅ collider. The width is determined by normalizing predicted signal and background distributions to 49 844 W→ eν candidates and 21 806 W→μν candidates in the transverse-mass region M_T < 200 GeV and then fitting the predicted shape to the 438 electron events and 196 muon events in the high-M_T region, 100<M_T < 200 GeV. The result is G Γ _W= 2.04 ± 0.11(stat) ± 0.09(syst) GeV.