On the determination of the mass and width of the Z0 from the total hadronic cross section in e+e- annihilation

We discuss the determination of the Z0 mass and width from the total hadronic cross section with emphasis on radiative corrections and normalization errors. We find that a combined fit of the mass and width, which takes the absolute normalization of the cross section into account, significantly reduces the errors in these parameters in comparison to the standard procedure of fitting only the shape of the resonance without considering the normalization. The improvement is especially important with small data samples; at high statistics the methods become equivalent and independent of the size of the overall normalization error. From a Monte Carlo study we propose a simple scanning strategy and several new Monte Carlo programs for e+e- annihilation including higher order radiative corrections have been compared in detail. (orig.)