Precise measurement of the left-right cross-section asymmetry in Z boson production by e+ e- collisions

We present a precise measurement of the left-right cross section asymmetry ($A_{LR}$) for $Z$ boson production by \ee collisions. The measurement was performed at a center-of-mass energy of 91.26 GeV with the SLD detector at the SLAC Linear Collider (SLC). The luminosity-weighted average polarization of the SLC electron beam was (63.0$\pm$1.1)%. Using a sample of 49,392 \z0 decays, we measure $A_{LR}$ to be 0.1628$\pm$0.0071(stat.)$\pm$0.0028(syst.) which determines the effective weak mixing angle to be \swein=0.2292\pm0.0009({\rm stat.})\pm0.0004({\rm syst.}).}Comment: 15 pages, no figure

Study of the four-jet anomaly observed at LEP centre-of-mass energies of 130 and 136 GeV

The four-jet events collected by DELPHI during the special LEP run at centre-of-mass energies of 130 and 136 GeV in 1997 with an integrated luminosity of 5.9 pb(-1) are analysed. Their rate and the distributions of their di-jet masses, their smallest jet charges, and their di-jet charge separations all agree well with Standard Model predictions. Thus the hypothesis of pair production of a new particle with a sum of di-jet masses around 105 GeV/c(2) is not supported. The combined result of the four LEP collaborations refuting this hypothesis at over 99% confidence level is also given. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved