A Study of High Transverse Momentum Electrons Produced in High Energy Proton-Antiproton Collisions

This thesis describes a study of high transverse momentum electron production using data taken by the UA1 experiment at the CERN SPS collider. The data were taken at a centre of mass energy of 546 GeV and 630 GeV, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 690 nb$^{-1}$. The fluctuation of a QCD jet into a single charged pion and neutral particles forms the dominant background to electron identification. The second source of background is the asymmetric conversion of high-Pf photons into electron-positron pairs within the material of the UA1 apparatus. The cuts used to enhance the electron signal are listed and the methods of estimating the background contributions are described. The rate and properties of the data have been compared directly with Monte Carlo predictions for the Drell-Yan process, J/$\Psi$ and $\Upsilon$ production, the leptonic decays of the W and Z In­ termediate Vector Bosons, and the semileptonic decays of heavy flavours. The data sample is in good agreement with Monte Carlo predictions without the need to include con­ tributions from top quark production. However, statistics are poor because the cuts impose a bias against all processes except for W and Z production, and the non-IVB processes are not easily distinguishable because the cuts impose a topological bias. In particular, the electron sample is unsuited to studies of J/$\Psi$,$\Upsilon$,and heavy flavour produc­tion, but the sample should be sensitive to the top quark signal given more statistics and if the top mass is not too large.