High-precision measurement of the W boson mass with the CMS experiment

Abstract

In the standard model of particle physics, the masses of the W and Z bosons, the carriers of the weak interaction, are uniquely related. A precise determination of their masses is important because quantum loops of heavy, undiscovered particles could modify this relationship. Although the Z mass is known to the remarkable precision of 22 parts per million (2.0 MeV), the W mass is known much less precisely. A global fit to measured electroweak observables predicts the W mass with 6 MeV uncertainty [1$-$3]. Reaching a comparable experimental precision would be a sensitive and fundamental test of the standard model, made even more urgent by a recent challenge to the global fit prediction by a measurement from the CDF Collaboration at the Fermilab Tevatron collider [4]. Here we report the measurement of the W mass by the CMS Collaboration at the CERN LHC, based on a large data sample of W $\to$ $\mu \nu$ events collected in 2016 at the proton-proton collision energy of 13 TeV. The measurement exploits a high-granularity maximum likelihood fit to the kinematic properties of muons produced in W decays. By combining an accurate determination of experimental effects with marked in situ constraints of theoretical inputs, we reach a precise measurement of the W mass, of 80 360.2 $\pm$ 9.9 MeV, in agreement with the standard model prediction.

Replaced with the published version. Added the journal reference and the DOI. All the figures and tables can be found at http://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/publications/SMP-23-002 (CMS Public Pages)

References in corpus (36)

• Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC
• The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations
• An Introduction to PYTHIA 8.2
• Matching NLO QCD computations with Parton Shower simulations: the POWHEG method
• Particle-flow reconstruction and global event description with the CMS detector
• The CMS trigger system
• Description and performance of track and primary-vertex reconstruction with the CMS tracker
• Parton distributions from LHC, HERA, Tevatron and fixed target data: MSHT20 PDFs
• The Path to Proton Structure at One-Percent Accuracy
• Precision luminosity measurement in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016 at CMS
• Electron and photon reconstruction and identification with the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC
• Performance of missing transverse momentum reconstruction in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV using the CMS detector
• The PDF4LHC21 combination of global PDF fits for the LHC Run III
• Delta r and the W-boson mass in the Singlet Extension of the Standard Model
• Measurement of the W Boson Mass with the D0 Detector
• Measurement of the W boson mass
• The CMS statistical analysis and combination tool: COMBINE
• Drell-Yan lepton-pair production: $q_T$ resummation at N${}^3$LL accuracy and fiducial cross sections at N${}^3$LO
• Global analysis of electroweak data in the Standard Model
• Fiducial $q_T$ resummation of color-singlet processes at N${}^3$LL+NNLO
• Performance of the CMS high-level trigger during LHC Run 2
• Compatibility and combination of world W-boson mass measurements
• Performance of the CMS muon trigger system in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV
• Measurements of the W boson rapidity, helicity, double-differential cross sections, and charge asymmetry in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV
• Measurement of the W-boson mass and width with the ATLAS detector using proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 7 TeV
• An investigation of the ${\alpha }_S$ and heavy quark mass dependence in the MSHT20 global PDF analysis
• Disentangling Long and Short Distances in Momentum-Space TMDs
• Drell-Yan Transverse-Momentum Spectra at N${}^3$LL${}^{\prime }$ and Approximate N${}^4$LL with SCETlib
• Strategies and performance of the CMS silicon tracker alignment during LHC Run 2
• Hadron-hadron collision mode in ReneSANCe-v1.3.0
• Combining QED and Approximate N${}^3$LO QCD Corrections in a Global PDF Fit: MSHT20qed_an3lo PDFs
• On electroweak corrections to neutral current Drell-Yan with the POWHEG BOX
• About the rapidity and helicity distributions of the W bosons produced at LHC
• The CMS Magnetic Field Measuring and Monitoring Systems
• The precision measurement of the W boson mass and its impact on physics
• Under-coverage in high-statistics counting experiments with finite MC samples

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Constraining the heavy leptophilic neutral gauge bosons through the $Z\to {\ell }^{+}{\ell }^{-}$, $W^{\pm }\to {\ell }^{\pm }{\nu }_{\ell }$, and $h\to {\ell }^{+}{\ell }^{-}$ decays