Measurement of the jet mass in hadronic decays of boosted W bosons at 13 TeV and extraction of the W boson mass

The jet mass of W bosons decaying to a quark-antiquark pair is measured in W+jets events from proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The data used were collected by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb⁻¹. Hadronic decays of W bosons with high momenta produce strongly collimated decay products due to the large Lorentz boost, and are reconstructed as single large-radius jets. These jets have a characteristic substructure that is exploited to distinguish them from the large background of quark- and gluon-initiated jets. The jet mass is computed using the soft-drop algorithm, which suppresses soft wide-angle radiation that leads to a broadening of the jet mass distribution. For the first time, unfolded measurements are presented of the double-differential W+jets cross section as a function of the jet transverse momentum and soft-drop mass. From these distributions, the W boson mass is obtained, with a value of 80.83 ± 0.55 GeV in a scheme with mass-dependent width, achieving the smallest uncertainty available today from an all-jets final state at a hadron collider.