News from the W boson

by Jan Kretzschmar (University of Liverpool (GB))

Wednesday 17 Jan 2024, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/London

Small Lecture Theatre (Poynting)

The W boson, the massive carrier of the charged weak current, continues to be a key piece in our understanding of the Standard Model even 40 years after the direct discovery. The most precise measurements are performed at hadron colliders in an environment where strong interaction effects are crucial to interpret the results. Especially of the mass measurement that has reached the 0.01% level is notoriously difficult, but of great interest to indirectly search for New Physics. In 2022, the CDF collaboration at the TeVatron made a splash with a new W boson mass measurement that was the most precise to date and at the same time was incompatible with the prediction derived from the Electroweak fit.

I will report on recent efforts to understand and combine the existing W mass measurements. In addition, I will present two new results from the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron collider: an improved analysis of the previous ATLAS result and an analysis of W production properties using special runs that is crucial to improve future measurements.

JanKretzschmar_wzseminar_Bham.pdf