https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3810-1
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Prospects for improving the LHC W boson mass measurement with forward muons
1
Dipartimento di Fisica, Sezione di Milano, Università degli Studi di Milano and INFN, Via Celoria 16, 20133, Milan, Italy
2
Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita degli Studi di Milano, Via Celoria 16, 20133, Milan, Italy
3
Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita degli Studi di Milano and INFN Sezione di Milano and TIF Lab, Via Celoria 16, 20133, Milan, Italy
4
Physikalisches Institut, Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat, Im Neuenheimer Feld, 226, 69120, Heidelberg, Germany
* e-mail: mika.vesterinen@cern.ch
Received:
28
September
2015
Accepted:
24
November
2015
Published online:
17
December
2015
Measurements of the W boson mass are planned by the ATLAS and CMS experiments, but for the time being, these may be unable to compete with the current world average precision of 15 MeV, due to uncertainties in the PDFs. We discuss the potential of a measurement by the LHCb experiment based on the charged lepton transverse momentum 
spectrum in 
decays. The unique forward acceptance of LHCb means that the PDF uncertainties would be anti-correlated with those of based measurements by ATLAS and CMS. We compute an average of ATLAS, CMS and LHCb measurements of 
from the distribution. Considering PDF uncertainties, this average is a factor of 1.3 more precise than an average of ATLAS and CMS alone. Despite the relatively low rate of W production in LHCb, we estimate that with the Run-II dataset, a measurement could be performed with sufficient experimental precision to exploit this anti-correlation in PDF uncertainties. The modelling of the lepton-pair transverse momentum distribution in the neutral current Drell–Yan process could be a limiting factor of this measurement and will deserve further studies.
© The Author(s), 2015
