Quark flavor identification in electron-positron annihilation

Acknowledgments I am most thankful to my thesis advisor, David Ritson, for the tremendous store of good advice that he gave me, most of which I eventually heeded. Without his bursts of enthusiasm tempered with patience and respect for opinions not his own, this thesis might never have been attempted. Various members of the MAC Collaboration deserve thanks for having designed and constructed the MAC detector, its electronics, and its software, and for collecting and processing the data that enable this analysis to be carried out. Special thanks go to Keith Rich, who designed and managed our superb data flow system, to Bill Ford, for good advice and for providing direction to the collaboration in time of need, and to Kwong Lau and Scott Clearwater, for helpful discussions. I thank Michael Peskin and Stanley Wojcicki for their helpful comments regarding this thesis. The preparation of this thesis was aided tremendously by the typesetting system TeX, which was written by Donald Knuth of the Stanford Computer Science Department, and made available at SLAC through the efforts of several people, most notably Roger Chaffee, to whom I extend my gratitude.