Promotiebericht
Nikhef, 25-09-2013
"Beauty in the Crowd:
Commissioning of the LHCb Pile-Up detector and first evidence of Bs-> mu+ mu-"
Serena Oggero, promovenda aan het Nikhef, verdedigt haar proefschrift donderdag 3 oktober 2013 aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
The framework that best describes particles and forces bounding them together is known as the Standard Model (SM). The SM provides a mathematically elegant picture of what our world is made of and how it is held together. It seems to be extremely successful in accommodating most of the observed phenomena, but at the same leaves open questions, some relating to the origin and evolution of the universe. Their answers might lie in other models that we call "New Physics" (NP).
One way to proceed to search for fenomena not explained by the SM is to push its precision frontier and look for indirect manifestations of New Physics in high energy collisions. This is the approach chosen by the LHCb experiment, a "beauty" LHC experiment focusing on heavy flavour physics studies.
In particular, the disintegration of a "Bs" particle into two muons ("mu") is considered especially convenient to probe NP models. For decades, various experiments looked for such decays, but no evidence was found before the result presented in this thesis.
The dissertation illustrates the analysis leading to the first world evidence of Bs->mu mu decays at LHCb. Additionally, it focuses on the commissioning of one of the LHCb subdetectors, the Pile-Up, designed to detect multiple interactions in proton beam collisions and to reject these events already at the trigger level.
Serena Oggero:
"Beauty in the Crowd:
Commissioning of the LHCb Pile-Up detector and first evidence of Bs-> mu+ mu-" (pdf)
De promotie vindt plaats op donderdag 3 oktober, om 11.45 in de aula van de universiteit, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam
Promotor: prof. dr. M.H.M.Merk, prof. dr. A. Pellegrino
Co-Promoter: dr. M.G. van Beuzekom
Contact: Serena Oggero