Statistical analysis of lifetime determinations in the presence of large errors

The lifetimes of the new particles are very short, and most of the experiments which measure decay times are subject to measurement errors which are not negligible compared with the decay times themselves. Bartlett has analyzed the problem of lifetime estimation if the error on each event is small or zero. For the case of non-negligible measurement errors, σsub(i), on each event, we are interested in a few basic questions: How well does maximum likelihood work. That is, (a) are the errors reasonable, (b) is the answer unbiased, and (c) are there other estimators with superior performance. We concentrate on the results of our Monte Carlo investigation for the case in which the experiment is sensitive over all times -infinity<xsub(i)<infinity