12,000

We have over 12,000 students, from over 100 countries, within one of the safest campuses in the UK

93%

93% of Lancaster students go into work or further study within six months of graduating

Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Model-independent measurement of the W boson he...

## Model-independent measurement of the W boson helicity in top quark decays

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal article

Published

???articleNumber??? 062004 14/02/2008 Physical Review Letters 6 100 7 English

### Abstract

We present the first model-independent measurement of the helicity of $W$ bosons produced in top quark decays, based on a 1 fb$^{-1}$ sample of candidate $t\bar{t}$ events in the dilepton and lepton plus jets channels collected by the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron $p\bar{p}$ Collider. We reconstruct the angle $\theta^*$ between the momenta of the down-type fermion and the top quark in the $W$ boson rest frame for each top quark decay. A fit of the resulting \costheta distribution finds that the fraction of longitudinal $W$ bosons $f_0 = 0.425 \pm 0.166 \hbox{(stat.)} \pm 0.102 \hbox{(syst.)}$ and the fraction of right-handed $W$ bosons $f_+ = 0.119 \pm 0.090 \hbox{(stat.)} \pm 0.053 \hbox{(syst.)}$, which is consistent at the 30% C.L. with the standard model.

### Bibliographic note

© 2008 The American Physical Society