Top Quark Mass in Events with two Charged Leptons at the D0 Experiment

Abstract

The top quark is the most massive observed fundamental subatomic particle, and at the Tevatron accelerator is produced mostly in top-antitop (t$\bar{t}$) quark pairs from the collisions of protons and anti-protons. Each top quark decays into a bottom quark and a W boson. The W boson can then decay into a pair of quarks, or into a charged lepton and a neutrino. The various decays can be broken up into three different channels based on the number of leptons from the decay of the W bosons: all-jets (with no leptons), lepton+jets (with one lepton), and dilepton (with two leptons). This dissertation will present a measurement of the top quark mass in the dilepton channel. The dilepton channel is characterized by two leptons, two neutrinos and two b-quarks. The neutrinos are not directly observed, but their absence is felt as missing transverse momentum (pT) in the detector. The combination of two leptons and large pT produces an easily isolated signal, giving the dilepton channel a high signal over background ratio. Having two neutrinos means that we cannot know what the transverse momenta of either neutrino is. This means that even if we knew the momenta of the leptons and b-quarks perfectly, we would be unable to reconstruct the mass of the top quark. This measurement gets around this problem by scanning over all possible values of the top mass, finding all consistent t{bar t} combinations, assigning a kinematic weight to each, and then adding the weights for each combination at a given possible top mass. The lepton momenta, jet momenta, and pT are only known to within some finite precision, so for a given top mass, I also vary each of these momenta within their resolutions and add the weights for a given possible top mass. After scanning over possible top masses, I choose the top mass with the largest sum of weights mtmax as an observable for the event. I then perform a template based likelihood fit of mt using mtmax. I analyze 322 candidate events collected by the D0 detector, and obtain a top quark mass of: mt= 174.8 ± 3.1 GeV.