Thesis submitted May 1999 to Tufts University.

Author
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Kristo Karr

Advisor
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Professor Krzysztof Sliwa

Title
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Measurement of the Top Quark Mass by Application of the Dalitz-Goldstein 
Method to Dilepton Events.

Abstract
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This dissertation presents a measurement of the top quark mass by application 
of the Dalitz-Goldstein method to dilepton top-antitop quark events. The 
events were produced by the Tevatron Collider at Fermilab via proton-antiproton 
collisions with center-of-mass energies of 1.8 TeV. The dilepton event sample 
was extracted from 109 inverse picobarns of data collected by the Collider Detector
at Fermilab (CDF) from August 1992 to July 1995. The sample contains a total of 
9 candidate events, 2.4 of which  are expected from background. Included in the 
dilepton final state are two neutrinos, which elude detection. This analysis 
constrains the problem by assuming an initial value for the top quark mass and
solving for the neutrino momenta via a geometrical construction developed by 
D.H. Dalitz and G. Goldstein. The top quark mass is sampled over a wide range of 
possible values and the most likely mass consistent with the data is chosen via a 
likelihood function. An important distinguishing feature of this mass fitting 
technique is its lack of dependence on missing transverse energy, a kinematic 
variable that is poorly measured by experiment. This analysis determines the top 
quark mass to be 157.1 +/- 10.9 (statistical) +4.3 -3.7 (systematic) GeV/c^2.


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