A new purpose for the W-boson mass measurement: Searching for New Physics in lepton+MET

• DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2024.138774
• Publication Date: 2024-06-05T17:47:02Z
• Authors: Kaustubh Agashe; Sagar Airen; Roberto Franceschini; Doojin Kim; Ashutosh V. Kotwal; Lorenzo Ricci; Deepak Sathyan
• Keywords: High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex); High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph); Physics; QC1-999; FOS: Physical sciences; High Energy Physics - Experiment

We show that the $m_W$ measurement is a direct probe of New Physics (NP) contributing to lepton and missing transverse momentum ($\ell+MET$), independently from indirect tests via the electroweak fit. Such NP modifies the kinematic distributions used to extract $m_W$, necessitating a simultaneous fit to $m_W$ and NP. This effect can in principle bias the $m_W$ measurement, but only to a limited extent for our considered models. Given that, we demonstrate that the agreement at high-precision with SM-predicted shapes results in bounds competitive to, if not exceeding, existing ones for two examples: anomalous $W$ decay involving a $L_μ - L_τ$ gauge boson and $\tildeν_{l} \tilde{l}$ production in the MSSM.<br/>8 pages, 7 figures<br/>