University of Pennsylvania
Department of Physics and Astronomy
High Energy Physics Seminar

Abstract

Collisions which produce two energetic leptons have long provided an excellent laboratory for discovery and measurement. The backgrounds which mimic this signature have very little contribution from the QCD processes which dominate the hadron collider environment. A parameter of great interest is the mass of the top quark, which is surprisingly large compared to that of other quarks; this large value suggests the possibility that the top quark has a special role in the story of particles and fields and might hold clues to help unravel the threads of this story. The kinematics of the dilepton decays of the top quark make it especially challenging for mass measurements. The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) has recently performed detailed analysis of the observed dilepton events and made the most precise measurement of the top quark mass from dilepton events to date.