The W Boson Mass Measurement

Abstract

The measurement of the W boson mass has been growing in importance as its precision has improved, along with the precision of other electroweak observables and the top quark mass. Over the last decade, the measurement of the W boson mass has been led at hadron colliders. Combined with the precise measurement of the top quark mass at hadron colliders, the W boson mass helped to pin down the mass of the Standard Model Higgs boson through its induced radiative correction on the W boson mass. With the discovery of the Higgs boson and the measurement of its mass, the electroweak sector of the Standard Model is over-constrained. Increasing the precision of the W boson mass probes new physics at the TeV-scale. We summarize an extensive Tevatron (1984Tevatron ( -2011 program to measure the W boson mass at the CDF and DØ experiments. We highlight the recent Tevatron measurements and prospects for the final Tevatron measurements.