C. S. Hill

Initial experience with the CDF layer 00 silicon detector

We report on initial experience with the CDF Layer 00 Detector. Layer 00 is an innovative, low-mass, silicon detector installed in CDF during the upgrade for Run 2A of the Tevatron. Noise pickup present during operation at CDF is discussed. An event-by-event pedestal correction implemented by CDF is presented. This off-line solution prevents L00 from being used in the current incarnation of the on-line displaced track trigger. Preliminary performance of Layer 00 is described.

Method for measurement of the top quark mass using the mean decay length of b hadrons in tt events

We present a new method for the experimental determination of the top quark mass that is based upon the mean distance of travel of b hadrons in top quark events. The dominant systematic uncertainties of this method are not correlated with those of other methods, but a large number of events is required to achieve small statistical uncertainty. Large tt event samples are expected from Run II of the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We show that by the end of Run II, a single experiment at the Tevatron could achieve a top quark mass uncertainty of ∼ 5 GeV/c 2 by this method alone. At the CERN LHC, this method could be comparable to all others methods, which are expected to achieve an uncertainty of ∼1.5 GeV/c 2 per experiment. This new method would provide a useful cross-check to other methods, and could be combined with them to obtain a substantially reduced overall uncertainty.

Observability of Higgs produced with top quarks and decaying to bottom quarks

The decay, H → bb, is dominant for a Standard Model Higgs boson in the mass range just above the exclusion limit of 114.4 GeV/c 2 reported by the LEP experiments. Unfortunately, an overwhelming abundance of b¯ b events arising from more mundane sources, together with the lack of precision inherent in the reconstruction of the Higgs mass, renders this decay modeaprioriundetectable in the case of direct Higgs production at the LHC. It is therefore of no small interest to investigate whether H → bb can be observed in those cases where the Higgs is produced in association with other massive particles. In this note, the results of a study of Higgs bosons produced in association with top quarks and decaying via H → bb are presented. The study was performed as realistically as possible by employing a full and detailed Monte Carlo simulation of the CMS detector followed by the application of trigger and reconstruction algorithms that were developed for use with real data. Important systematic effects resulting from such sources as the uncertainties in the jet energy scale and the estimated rates for correctly tagging b jets or mistagging non-b jets have been taken into account. The impact of large theoretical uncertainties in the cross sections for t tp lusN jets processes due to an absence of next-to-leading order calculations is also considered.

The effect of dead-timeless silicon strip readout at CDF II

The Run IIa CDF Silicon Upgrade has recently finished installation. The detector uses revision D of the SVX3 readout IC. This final revision incorporated new features in order to improve the potential of dead-timeless operation. This paper describes measurements of dead-timeless effects on silicon strip readout on the test bench. This paper also describes tests of the dynamic pedestal subtraction circuitry, which is shown to improve greatly the dead-timeless performance of the silicon systems.