Simultaneously determining the $W^{\pm }$ boson mass and parton shower model parameters

Abstract

We explore the possibility of simultaneously determining the $W$ boson mass, $m_W$, and QCD-related nuisance parameters that affect the $W$ boson $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ spectrum from a fit to the $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ spectrum of the muon in the leptonic decay $W\to \mu \nu$. The study is performed using pseudodata generated using Pythia and the muon is required to fall in a kinematic region corresponding to the approximate acceptance of the LHCb detector. We find that the proposed method performs well and has little trouble disentangling variations in the muon $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ spectrum due to $m_W$ from those due to the $W$ boson $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ model.

18 pages, 22 figures, submission to SciPost