Precision Measurement of the Mass of the W boson

Since the prediction of its existence in 1968 by Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and Abdus Salam, the W boson has been one of the most important areas of particle physics research for several reasons. First, the decays of the W boson are a great test for lepton flavour universality through its decays to lepton-antineutrino pairs (or antilepton-neutrino pairs). Another area of investigation around the W boson is linked to its hadronic decays, as these are dependent on both the strong coupling constant and the top two rows of the CKM matrix. More recently, the measurement of the W boson mass made by the CDF collaboration has caused a great deal more interest in this area as the measurement of 80,433 9 MeV lies far outside the current accepted world average from PDG of 80,379 12 MeV. With a deviation of over 7 from the world average it is clear to see the importance of obtaining further measurements of the W mass to determine if this value from CDF is credible, which, if it were the case, would allude to, and be concrete evidence for, effects from beyond standard model physics. As such, this investigation will take advantage of the latest data from RUN 3 of the LHC at s = 13.6 TeV using the ATLAS detector to conduct a precision measurement of the W boson mass.