Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction and overview
- 2 Basic observables
- 3 Some experimental techniques
- 4 The search for structure
- 5 Origins of high pT physics – the search for the W boson
- 6 Discovery of hard scattering in p-p collisions
- 7 Direct single lepton production and the discovery of charm
- 8 J/Ψ, ϒ and Drell–Yan pair production
- 9 Two particle correlations
- 10 Direct photon production
- 11 The search for jets
- 12 QCD in hard scattering
- 13 Heavy ion physics in the high pT era
- 14 RHIC and LHC
- Appendix A Probability and statistics
- Appendix B Methods of Monte Carlo calculations
- Appendix C TAB and the Glauber Monte Carlo calculation
- Appendix D Fits including systematic errors
- Appendix E The shape of the XE distribution triggered by a jet fragment, for example, π0
- Appendix F kT phenomenology and Gaussian smearing
- References
- Index
5 - Origins of high pT physics – the search for the W boson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction and overview
- 2 Basic observables
- 3 Some experimental techniques
- 4 The search for structure
- 5 Origins of high pT physics – the search for the W boson
- 6 Discovery of hard scattering in p-p collisions
- 7 Direct single lepton production and the discovery of charm
- 8 J/Ψ, ϒ and Drell–Yan pair production
- 9 Two particle correlations
- 10 Direct photon production
- 11 The search for jets
- 12 QCD in hard scattering
- 13 Heavy ion physics in the high pT era
- 14 RHIC and LHC
- Appendix A Probability and statistics
- Appendix B Methods of Monte Carlo calculations
- Appendix C TAB and the Glauber Monte Carlo calculation
- Appendix D Fits including systematic errors
- Appendix E The shape of the XE distribution triggered by a jet fragment, for example, π0
- Appendix F kT phenomenology and Gaussian smearing
- References
- Index
Summary
Why were some people studying “high pT” physics in the 1960s?
The quick answer is that they were looking for a “left handed” intermediate boson W±, the proposed carrier of the weak interaction [35]. Although the possibility of Fermi's point-like weak interaction of β decay [18,19] being transmitted by a boson field was originally discussed by Yukawa [222] and other authors, the modern concept of the parity-violating intermediate vector bosons W± as the quanta that transmit the weak interaction was introduced by Lee and Yang in the year 1960 [35, 36] to avoid a breakdown of unitarity in neutrino scattering at high energies if the weak interaction remained point-like [35]; and experiments were proposed to detect the intermediate bosons with high energy neutrinos [37, 38]. Neutrino beams at the new BNL-AGS and CERN-PS accelerators provided the first opportunity to study weak interactions at high energy, whereas previously weak interactions had only been studied via radioactive decay.
The first high energy neutrino experiment at the BNL-AGS [39] set a limit on the mass of the intermediate boson of roughly less than the mass of the proton MW ≲ Mp. However, much more importantly, this experiment discovered that the neutrinos from charged pion decay produced only muons.
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- High-pT Physics in the Heavy Ion Era , pp. 85 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013