Detection of Z' Gauge Bosons in the Di-muon Decay Mode in CMS

We present a study of the potential of the CMS experiment to discover Z' gauge bosons in the Z' --> mu+ mu- decay channel. Unbinned maximum likelihood fits to mu+ mu- invariant mass distributions were used to extract signal and background contributions from fully-reconstructed sets of simulated data. The performance of various statistical methods for expressing the significance of a supposed signal was studied, and the method with the most desirable performance was used to obtain estimates of the Z' mass reach. Using signal and background shapes only, and with systematic uncertainties yet to be accounted for, the discovery reach for a representative set of Z' models was found to be in the range between 3.4 and 4.3 TeV for an integrated luminosity of 100 fb^{-1}.