Though the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics has successfully explained all experimental results to date, there are a few compelling reasons that physicists believe the SM must be the lower energy limit of a new theory. At CDF, we hope to find evidence for new particles not contained in the SM and to discover the Higgs boson, the last particle predicted by the model that gives mass to all the others but has yet to be seen.

I am working on finding find tau leptons in events with another lepton (electron or muon) where the leptons each result from the decay of a W boson that itself was produced via the decay of a top quark. This webpage and note summarize the analysis that we performed. The top quark was originally discovered at the Tevatron in 1995 (Run I) with about 25 events containing a top and anti-top quark pair. I have recently co-led the BTagging group at CDF during which time we found about 10 times as many events with top and anti-top quark pairs in a data sample about five times larger (we were helped by the increased Tevatron Run II energy too). These events were used to make the world's most precise measurement of the top quark mass.