About Author: Sarah Alam Malik - Most of the time you can’t understand what she is saying but apparently it makes sense to CERN. (It has something to do with matter not quite being matter but being against matter or proving that matter exists. Does it matter? The woman is a Pakistani scientist, that’s what matters!). This lady is an example of what thousands of Pakistani girls could achieve if they were all given good education and opportunities. The talent in Pakistan has no limits
Abstract: A precision measurement of the mass and width of the W boson is presented. The W bosons are produced in proton antiproton collisions occurring at a centre of mass energy of 1.96 TeV at the Tevatron accelerator. The data used for the analyses is collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) and corresponds to an average integrated luminosity of 350 pb−1 for the W width analysis for the electron and muon channels and an average integrated luminosity of 2350 pb−1 for the W mass analysis.
The mass and width of the W boson is extracted by fitting to the transverse mass distribution, with the peak of the distribution being most sensitive to the mass and the tail of the distribution sensitive to the width. The W width measurement in the electron and muon channels is combined to give a final result of 2032 ± 73 MeV. The systematic uncertainty on the W mass from the recoil of the W boson against the initial state gluon radiation is discussed. A systematic study of the recoil in Z ! e+e− events where one electron is reconstructed in the central calorimeter and the other in the plug calorimeter and its effect on the W mass is presented for the first time in this thesis
Read her full thesis here
Abstract: A precision measurement of the mass and width of the W boson is presented. The W bosons are produced in proton antiproton collisions occurring at a centre of mass energy of 1.96 TeV at the Tevatron accelerator. The data used for the analyses is collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) and corresponds to an average integrated luminosity of 350 pb−1 for the W width analysis for the electron and muon channels and an average integrated luminosity of 2350 pb−1 for the W mass analysis.
The mass and width of the W boson is extracted by fitting to the transverse mass distribution, with the peak of the distribution being most sensitive to the mass and the tail of the distribution sensitive to the width. The W width measurement in the electron and muon channels is combined to give a final result of 2032 ± 73 MeV. The systematic uncertainty on the W mass from the recoil of the W boson against the initial state gluon radiation is discussed. A systematic study of the recoil in Z ! e+e− events where one electron is reconstructed in the central calorimeter and the other in the plug calorimeter and its effect on the W mass is presented for the first time in this thesis
Read her full thesis here
