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Contribution to the Development of the LHCb Vertex Locator
and Study of Rare Semileptonic Decays
PhD thesis full text
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- Acrobat PDF file: pdf (10.3 MB)
Chapters:
Part 1 - Overview:
- Chapter 1: General Public Introduction
This chapter presents particle physics, the LHCb experiment and my work in
non-technical words. It is intended for non experts and is probably the only chapter
which is accessible to non-physicists. It focuses on the aspects of particle physics
which are related to my
research and help to understand it, but other aspects reflecting my interests
within particle physics are also presented.
- Chapter 2: Theoretical Overview
This chapter presents an overview of the theoretical background
needed to understand the motivation of the LHCb experiment and the study of
rare semileptonic B decays. First the construction of the
Standard Model is presented, leading to quark mixing and CP violation.
Operator product expansion is introduced and used in an
overview of the theory of flavour changing neutral current
induced B decays.
- Chapter 3: The LHCb Experiment at LHC
This chapter describes the LHCb experiment.
First the LHC accelerator is briefly presented.
Then the LHCb sub-detectors and the trigger scheme are described with a special care for the
aspects which are important in this study. Some aspects of the vertex locator (VeLo)
and its interplay with the L1 trigger are developed in more details in
Chapter 5. Finally the simulation of the LHCb experiment is presented.
Part 2 - Development of the Vertex Locator:
- Chapter 4: Simulation of Charge Deposition in Silicon Sensors
A detailed simulation of the electric process associated to a charged particle
crossing a silicon sensor is presented here.
First the basic theory is reviewed and the implementation explained.
The predictions are then compared to testbeam results.
- Chapter 5: The Level-1 Trigger Preprocessor and Interface
This chapter presents in some more details the L1 electronics of
the VeLo system and its interplay with the
Level-1 topology trigger. Strategies to cope with
electronic noise are presented and their effect on
the L1 trigger efficiency are discussed. The effect of pulse
overspill is also discussed.
Part 3 - Search for Rare Semimuonic B Decays at LHCb:
- Chapter 6: Event Generation
This chapter reviews the main aspects of event generation.
The RareB Monte Carlo program used to generate B → μμXs events is presented
and the final states of this inclusive decay analyzed. B → μμXd and
Bs → μμXss event generation are briefly presented and the main
background sources of dimuons are given. Results using the full Geant-based simulation are discussed in
the next chapter.
- Chapter 7: Event Selection
This chapter presents the analysis of the B → μμX channel using
the full LHCb simulation.
First we describe the bias of the signal due to the detector response. Then
we present the selection and triggering strategies.
Finally we discuss the main contributions to background.
The appendix to this chapter contains details about related
topics as primary vertex reconstruction, muon identification
or Pi0 finding.
- Chapter 8: Physics Yields
This chapter presents the expected physics yields, i.e. the precision
LHCb can reach for the observables described in Chapter 2.
All results are presented for one year of data taking. Some results are also extrapolated to
the full LHC era.
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