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Model-independent measurement of the W boson helicity in top quark decays at D0

The D0 collaboration Abazov, V.M. ; Abbott, B. ; Abolins, M. ; et al.

Phys.Rev.Lett. 100 (2008) 062004, 2008.

Inspire Record 767094 DOI 10.17182/hepdata.47072

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.

6 data tables

Table 1

COS(THETA*) distribution for leptonic W decay in lepton+jets events.. Data are read from plots and errors are statistcial (sqrt(N)).

Table 2

COS(THETA*) distribution for hadronic W decay in lepton+jets events.. Data are read from plots and errors are statistcial (sqrt(N)).

Table 3

COS(THETA*) distribution for W decay in dilepton events.. Data are read from plots and errors are statistcial (sqrt(N)).