Evelin Bakos, PhD at Nikhef will defend her thesis Wednesday 15 January 2025 at 10.30 at the Radboud University.
“Radiative W boson decay studies and the upgrade of the ATLAS muon spectrometer readout system”
Due to the nature of elementary particles, one needs a special detector, such as ATLAS to observe their properties and interactions. As part of ATLAS, the readout system of the muon spectrometer is dependent on MROD cards, which will reach end of their lifetime soon, therefore a new software-based implementation is needed. This thesis describes a plugin of this software which has been developed to mimic the MROD building mechanism. ATLAS is designed to test the Standard Model, therefore searches for not (yet) detected decays and more precise measurements are necessary. Radiative decays of the W boson are sensitive to the coupling of the boson with the photon and probe the strongly coupled QCD regime. The search for the W→ργ is experimentally challenging due to the background. A new selection criterion and a background modelling approach presented in the thesis provides the first ever limit for the W→ργ decay. To make things more efficient a machine learning algorithm can be developed specifically for meson tagging. An algorithm, presented in this thesis, is able to identify jets originating from Ds mesons in radiative W decays and shows a good efficiency which presents an opportunity to improve measurements related to Ds mesons.
”Radiative W boson decay studies and the upgrade of the ATLAS muon spectrometer readout system” (pdf)
The PhD defense will take place at the Aula of the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Comeniuslaan 2, Nijmegen
More information and a link to the livestream (click Aula) on the website of the Radboud Universiteit
Supervisor: prof. dr. N. de Groot
Co-supervisor: dr. N. Vranjes
Contact: Evelin Bakos