My most visible contribution to particle physics after my death might well one sad day turn out to be the sketching of W and Z boson identification diagrams I made in 1999 for a talk I was to attend at Moriond QCD. I must have been on a bright day when I set out to make those graphs, because everywhere I turn I see somebody using them -without paying any recognition to me of course. I noticed the trend two years ago, and I get reminded of it periodically.

Recognition is not an issue, of course. I totally subscribe to the internet rule "grab what you like, use it as you please". References to sources are totally unnecessary, and actually a nuisance. So what am I complaining about, really? Hmm, nothing. Actually I like to see those old figures being displayed over and over at international conferences around the world.  This time was in a talk by Pierre Petroff, who is presently in the process of finishing his presentation at "Physics in Collisions", the conference I am attending in Kobe, Japan. He used the plots extensively, in two separate slides. He even added some scribblings on top of my admittedly perfect graphics.

Below are the figures. They show a transverse view of an idealized detector (loosely inspired by CDF), which is composed of an inner tracker, a calorimeter, and outer muon detection elements.






In the first figure above the W boson decay is taken to involve an electron and a neutrino, and it results in a large energy deposit in the calorimeter (in red) correlated with a stiff track, plus some detected energy in the hadronic calorimeter from initial state radiation (the so-called "W recoil"), and a global unbalance in the energy due to the escaping neutrino. Also notice a few additional tracks coming out of the collision point: they represent underlying event activity and multiple interactions, that produce some small energy flow uncorrelated with the boson production.



In the second figure a  Z boson instead decays to a muon pair. Here you see two stiff tracks, correlated with hits in the outer muon detection elements. The hadronic recoil is still there, but this time there is no imbalance in the transverse energy measured in the calorimeter, since no neutrinos are produced.

I hope you will concur that these plots are rather good. They show everything that is relevant, and nothing more. If somebody should hang them on my tombstone after I pass away, I would be pleased.