A Preliminary Direct Measurement of the Parity-Violating Coupling of the Z{sup 0} to Strange Quarks, A{sub s}

Abstract

We present an updated direct measurement of the parity-violating coupling of the Z 0 to strange quarks, A s , derived from the full SLD data sample of approximately 550,000 hadronic decays of Z 0 bosons produced with a polarized electron beam and recorded by the SLD experiment at SLAC between 1993 and 1998. Z 0 ! s s events are tagged by the presence in each event hemisphere of a high-momentum K , K s or 0 / 0 identied using the Cherenkov Ring Imaging Detector and/or a mass tag. The CCD vertex detector is used to suppress the background from heavy-avor events. The strangeness of the tagged particle is used to sign the event thrust axis in the direction of the initial s quark. The coupling A s is obtained directly from a measurement of the left-right-forward-backward production asymmetry in polar angle of the tagged s quark. The background from u u and d d events is measured from the data, as is the analyzing power of the method for s s events. We measure: