Colloquia

Particle physics is at the threshold of an exciting new era. A crucial experimental pursuit is the search for and observation of the Higgs boson, a prominent missing piece in the widely successful standard model of the fundamental world. Searches at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider in Illinois are closing in on the Higgs, while experiments at the new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are scheduled to begin operations later this year. One of the main signatures for the Higgs contains a W boson and one or more b quarks. However, this signature is shared by more common electroweak and strong processes that have not been determined precisely by experiment until now. Herein I will present a new measurement by CDF of W boson and b quark production. This measurement will contribute to improvements in the theoretical models, and I will discuss how this result can be used to sharpen searches for the Higgs and for physics beyond the standard model at both the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider.