Observation of the muonic decay of the charged intermediate vector boson

Abstract Muons of high transverse momentum p μ T have been observed in the large drift chambers surrounding the UA1 detector at the CERN 540 GeV pp collider. For an integrated luminosity of 108 nb −1 , 14 isolated muons have been found with p T > 15 GeV/ c . They are correlated with a large imbalance in total transverse energy, and show a kinematic behaviour consistent with the muonic decay of the Intermediate Vector Boson W ± of weak interactions. The partial cross section is in agreement with previous measurements for electronic decays and with muon-electron universality. The W mass is determined to be m W = 81 +6 −7 GeV/ c 2 .