Experimental Study of W Z Intermediate Bosons Associated Production with the CDF Experiment at the Tevatron Collider
Studying WZ associated production at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider is of great importance for two main reasons. On the one hand, this process would be sensitive to anomalies in the triple gauge couplings such that any deviation from the value predicted by the Standard Model would be indicative of new physics. In addition, by choosing to focus on the final state where the Z boson decays to b{bar b} pairs, the event topology would be the same as expected for associated production of a W and a Standard Model light Higgs boson (m{sub H} {approx}< 135 GeV) which decays into b{bar b} pairs most of times. The process WH {yields} W b{bar b} has an expected {sigma} {center_dot} B about five times lower than WZ {yields} Wb{bar b} for m{sub H} {approx_equal} 120 GeV. Therefore, observing this process would be a benchmark for an even more difficult search aiming at discovering the light Higgs in the WH {yields} Wb{bar b} process. After so many years of Tevatron operation only a weak WZ signal was recently observed in the full leptonic decay channel, which suffers from much less competition from background. Searching for the Z in the b{bar b} decay channel in this process is clearly a very challenging endeavour. In the work described in this thesis, WZ production is searched for in a final state where the W decays leptonically to an electron-neutrino pair or a muon-neutrino pair, with associated production of a jet pair consistent with Z decays. A set of candidate events is obtained by applying appropriate cuts to the parameters of events collected by wide acceptance leptonic triggers. To improve the signal fraction of the selected events, an algorithm was used to tag b-flavored jets by means of their content of long lived b-hadrons and corrections were developed to the jet algorithm to improve the b-jet energy resolution for a better reconstruction of the Z mass. In order to sense the presence of a signal one needs to estimate the amount of background. The relative content of heavy flavor jets in the dominant W+multijet background is assumed as predicted by theory. This technique was originally developed in CDF to measure the t{bar t} production cross section in the final state with W + 3 or more jets. This thesis was conceived as the first attempt within CDF to apply a customized version of it to look for evidence of diboson production in the final state with aW and two jets. Extracting the signal in this channel is very hard since with such a small number of jets the background is two orders of magnitude greater than the signal. Moreover, since the signal to background ratio is very small, the expected sensitivity depends critically on the theoretical uncertainties on the amount of background. While work is in progress to understand this background more reliably, this analysis provides an estimate of the achievable upper limit on the WZ production cross section.
- Research Organization:
- Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-07CH11359
- OSTI ID:
- 940852
- Report Number(s):
- FERMILAB-MASTERS-2007-01; TRN: US0807269
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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