English

Bayesian inference of $W$-boson mass

High Energy Physics - Experiment 2023-07-06 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Abstract

We use a Bayesian regression technique (similar to a recent analysis by Rinaldi et al) to obtain a central estimate for the WW-boson mass using four different combinations of datasets compiled by the PDG including the 2022 CDF result. We use three different priors on the unknown intrinsic scatter and also a non-parametric hierarchical Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture model to obtain a world average for WW-boson mass. We also evaluate the statistical significance of the discrepancy with respect to the Standard model for each of the datasets. We find that for all the combination of datasets and the aformentioned prior choices, the discrepancy with respect to the Standard Model value for the WW-mass is less than 3σ\sigma. We also checked that if we use a narrow prior on the intrinsic scatter, we get a discrepancy of about 3.8σ\sigma compared to the Standard model value.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.09557,
  title  = {Bayesian inference of $W$-boson mass},
  author = {Aaseesh Rallapalli and Shantanu Desai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.09557},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in EPJC

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:17:58.615Z