Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

Fall 2006

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Program

Doctor of Philosophy in Physics

University

University of California, Berkeley

Department

Graduate Division

First Advisor

Professor Young-Kee, Co-Chair

Second Advisor

Professor James Siegrst, Co-Chair

Keywords

CDF, top quark, top quark mass, matrix element method, Tevatron, lepton plus jets, and jet energy scale

Subject Categories

Elementary Particles and Fields and String Theory | Physical Sciences and Mathematics | Physics

Abstract

We present a measurement of the mass of the top quark. Our event sample is selected from proton-antiproton collisions, at 1.96 TeV center-of-mass energy, observed with the CDF detector at Fermilab's Tevatron. We consider a 318 pb-1 dataset collected between March 2002 and August 2004. We select events that contain one energetic lepton, large missing transverse energy, exactly four energetic jets, and at least one displaced vertex b tag. Our analysis uses leading-order tt and background matrix elements along with parameterized parton showering to construct event-by-event likelihoods as a function of top quark mass. From the 63 events observed with the 318 pb-1 dataset we extract a top quark mass of 172.0 ± 2.6 (stat) ±3-3 (syst) GeV/c2 from the joint likelihood. The mean expected statistical uncertainty is 3.2 GeV/c2 for mt = 178 GeV/c2 and 3.1 GeV/c2 for mt = 172.5 GeV/c2. The systematic error is dominated by the uncertainty of the jet energy scale.

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