A precision measurement of the mass of the top quark

Abstract

The standard model of particle physics contains parameters-such as particle masses-whose origins are still unknown and which cannot be predicted, but whose values are constrained through their interactions. In particular, the masses of the top quark (M_t) and W boson (M_W) constrain the mass of the long-hypothesized, but thus far not observed, Higgs boson. A precise measurement of M_t can therefore indicate where to look for the Higgs, and indeed whether the hypothesis of a standard model Higgs is consistent with experimental data. As top quarks are produced in pairs and decay in only about 10^-24 s into various final states, reconstructing their masses from their decay products is very challenging. Here we report a technique that extracts more information from each top-quark event and yields a greatly improved precision (of ± 5.3 GeV/c) when compared to previous measurements. When our new result is combined with our published measurement in a complementary decay mode and with the only other measurements available, the new world average for M_t becomes4 178.0± 4.3 GeV/c². As a result, the most likely Higgs mass increases from the experimentally excluded value of 96 to 117 GeV/c², which is beyond current experimental sensitivity. The upper limit on the Higgs mass at the 95% confidence level is raised from 219 to 251 GeV/c ².