The 58th Winter Nuclear & Particle Physics Conference 2021

9-12 February 2021
Virtual Meeting
America/Toronto timezone

Measurement of W Boson Drell-Yan Angular Coefficients

12 Feb 2021, 16:30
15m
Virtual Meeting

Virtual Meeting

Electroweak and Higgs Physics

Speaker

Alexander Bachiu (Carleton University)

Description

The Large Hadron Collider located at CERN outside of Geneva, Switzerland uses proton-proton collisions to produce a wide range of particles. W and Z bosons, the mediators of the fundamental weak force, are some of the particles that can be produced in proton-proton collisions and can be used to give a more complete understanding of the Standard Model. One of the ways they can decay is into detectable lepton particles, such as electrons, which can be measured with the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) detector. The Drell-Yan process is the production of W/Z bosons in proton-proton interactions with leptonic final states. Its differential cross-section expresses the probability for this process to occur depending on the W/Z bosons’ and decay products’ kinematic variables. It can be separated into eight spin-related ratios, known as the Drell-Yan angular coefficients. The coefficients are coupled to trigonometric polynomials which contain information about the detected leptons. Using the property that the polynomials are orthogonal to each other, it is possible to isolate each coefficient. This talk will cover my research of measuring these coefficients for the W bosons with special data sets. This measurement gives both a unique result for many of the coefficients as well as it helps reduce the uncertainty for other measurements like the mass of the W bosons.