- July 8, 2026, 3:30 pm US/Central
- Prof. Christoph Paus, MIT
- Pushpa Bhat
Measurements of the masses of the W and Z bosons and of the weak mixing angle have profoundly shaped our understanding of the Standard Model. This colloquium traces their remarkable history, from the discovery of neutral currents at Gargamelle in 1973, to the discovery of the W and Z at the SPS, to the extraordinary precision reached at electron-positron and hadron colliders. Today, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb are making new measurements of these quantities, pushing the precision beyond that of legacy measurements in some cases.
We look ahead to the opportunities offered by the HL-LHC and proposed future facilities such as FCC-ee, where ultimate precisions on these quantities probe new physics at scales of tens of TeV. This talk highlights the experimental ingenuity and theoretical developments needed for these measurements, and why these “old” observables remain among the sharpest tools we have to search for what lies beyond the Standard Model.