Precision electroweak heavy flavor results from LEP and SLC

The traditional Electroweak measurements made at Z factories using undifferentiated hadronic and leptonic Z decays will soon be reaching their asymptotic limits in precision. Consequently, much attention has recently been focused on extracting electroweak parameters from hadronic decays differentiated through heavy flavor tagging. This paper gives an overview of the various techniques used at LEP and SLC to tag heavy flavors. The measurements of the forward backward asymmetries and the partial widths for Z#->#b anti b and Z#->#c anti c decays are briefly described. The most recent results for these are presented, and are interpreted within the framework of the Standard Model. The precision of the electroweak parameters extracted from these measurements is shown to be comparable to that from other techniques. Assembling all the LEP electroweak data, constraints on the top and Higgs masses are found. The heavy flavor results, and in particular the new, very accurate Z#->#b anti b partial width measurements, are shown to play a key role in these limits. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: RR 2916(93-25) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman