Measurement of the $W$ boson mass with the D0 detector

Abstract

We give a detailed description of the measurement of the $W$ boson mass, $M_W$, performed on an integrated luminosity of 4.3 fb$^{-1}$, which is based on similar techniques as used for our previous measurement done on an independent data set of 1 fb$^{-1}$ of data. The data were collected using the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. This data set yields $1.68\times 10^6$ $W\rightarrow e\nu$ candidate events. We measure the mass using the transverse mass, electron transverse momentum, and missing transverse energy distributions. The $M_W$ measurements using the transverse mass and the electron transverse momentum distributions are the most precise of these three and are combined to give $M_W$ = 80.367 $\pm$ 0.013 (stat) $\pm$ 0.022 (syst) GeV = 80.367 $\pm$ 0.026 GeV. When combined with our earlier measurement on 1 fb$^{-1}$ of data, we obtain $M_W$ = 80.375 $\pm$ 0.023 GeV.