| Neutrino Production of Opposite Sign Dimuons in the NOMAD Experiment (2007) | |||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||
| This paper presents the results of an analysis of opposite sign dimuon events carried out by the NOMAD collaboration. The distributions of various kinematic variables are compared with a theoretical model of dimuon production, constructed within the framework of leading order QCD, to yield a determination of the charm quark mass, m c , the strange quark fraction of the nucleon sea, , and the average semileptonic branching ratio, B c . The paper is organised as follows : Section 2 outlines the theoretical description of opposite sign dimuon production within the framework of leading order QCD and Section 3 gives a brief description of the neutrino beam. The detector is described in Section 4 along with a description of the simulation programs used in the analysis (Section 4.2), a description of the data selection process and a discussion of the background determination. Section 5 presents details of the analysis and Section 6 contains a discussion and a comparison with the results of other experiments. Finally, Section 7 summarizes the results. 4 2 Theory In the Standard Model, an opposite sign dimuon event is produced when a neutrino interacts, via a charged current, with a strange (s) or down (d) quark, producing a charm (c) quark. The charm quark fragments into a charmed hadron (most frequently a D meson) which can then decay semileptonically resulting in a final state containing two oppositely charged muons : the primary | |||||||||||||
Publication details | |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||