Precision Measurements Of The Top Quark Mass And Width With The D0 Detector

Since the discovery of the top quark in 1995 at the Fermliab Tevatron Collider, top quark properties have been measured with ever higher precision. In this article, recent measurements of the top quark mass and its width using up to 3.6 fb−1 of D0 data are summarized. Different techniques and final states have been examined and no deviations within these measurements have been observed. In addition to the direct measurements, a measurement of the top quark mass from its production cross section and a measurement of the top-antitop quark mass difference are discussed. With a mass of 173.3 ± 1.1 GeV, the top quark is the heaviest of all known fundamental particles. Due to the high mass, its Yukawa coupling is close to unity suggesting that it may play a special role in electroweak symmetry breaking. Precise measurements of both, the W boson and the top quark mass, constrain the mass of the yet unobserved Higgs boson and allow to restrict certain extensions of the Standard Model. At the Tevatron collider with a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV, 85% of the top quark pairs are produced in quark-antiquark annihilation; 15% originate from gluon fusion. Top quarks are predicted to decay almost exclusively to a W boson and a bottom quark. According to the number of hadronic W decays, top events are classified into all-jets, lepton+jets and dilepton events. The lepton+jets channel is characterized by four jets, one isolated, energetic charged lepton and missing transverse energy. With 30%, the branching fraction of the lepton+jets channel is about seven times larger than the one of the dilepton channel whereas the signal to background ratio is about three times smaller. The main background in this final state comes from W +jets events. Instrumental background arises from events in which a jet is misidentified as an electron and events with heavy hadrons that decay into leptons which pass the isolation requirements. The topology of the dilepton channel is described by two jets, two isolated, energetic charged leptons and significant missing transverse energy from the undetected neutrinos. The main background are Z + jets and diboson events (WW/WZ/ZZ+jets) as well as instrumental background as characterized above. At the D0 experiment, different techniques are used to measure the top quark mass. They are summarized in the following sections together with the first measurement of the top anti-top quark mass difference and the first precise determination of the top quark width.