| Seminar Date: | Thursday, October 10, 2013 |
| Time: | 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM |
| Location: | Madrone |
| Abstract: | Single top quarks at the Tevatron are produced via the electroweak interaction from the decay of an off-shell W boson in the s-channel, or fusion of a virtual W boson with a b quark in the t-channel. In particular, the s-channel production rate is comparatively low at the LHC, and the much larger background contamination at the LHC would make it very difficult to measure the s-channel cross section. In this talk, I will present the analysis that led to the first evidence for s-channel single top-quark production. The measurement is based on 9.7/fb ppbar collisions at sqrt{s} = 1.96 TeV collected with the D0 detector. Both the s and t-channel cross sections are simultaneously measured without assuming the standard model prediction for either, and the CKM quark mixing matrix element |Vtb|, which describes the Wtb coupling, is directly determined. |
| Speaker: | Yun-Tse Tsai - Rochester
 The speaker received her undergraduate degree in both physics and
mathematics from National Taiwan University in 2005. Based upon the
search for two-body baryonic B decays at Belle, she earned a Master of
Science in Physics in 2006. The speaker soon thereafter went to the
University of Rochester, and continued research in the field of
particle physics under the supervision of Professor Aran
Garcia-Bellido. She participated in the t-channel single top quark
observation, and her work culminated in her PhD thesis, which led to
evidence for s-channel single top quark production and her winning of
the Lobkowicz Thesis Prize of the University of Rochester in May 2013.
|