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Query: faculty: "FNWI" and publication year: "2011"

AuthorAkshay Katre
TitlePions Misidentied as Muons in the LHCb Detector
SupervisorsThomas S. Bauer, Els de Wolf, Marcel Vreeswijk
Year2011
Pages114
FacultyFaculty of Science
ProgrammeFNWI MSc Physics
AbstractThe Standard Model of particle physics is a mathematical model that explains how the sub-atomic world functions. It describes the interaction of various particles that are the building blocks of the universe. This model needs to incorporate every phenomena that is observed in Nature; one such example is why the universe is made of more matter particles than anti-matter particles. The Standard Model suggests that the CP Violation observed in Nature is responsible for this asymmetry between particle and anti-particles. CP stands for Charge-Parity and it represents a symmetry in the Standard Model. It means that all processes that are spacially inversed and their electric charges switched, should yield the same results as the original process. However, this symmetry was shown to be violated in the 1960s. The Standard Model has essentially started by trying to explain this effect. The amount of CP Violation predicted by the Standard Model however is largely insufficient to explain the large asymmetry between the particles and anti-particles; and thus another source of CP Violation needs to be found. The LHCb experiment at CERN is designed to better understand the details of CP Violation and searches for any hint of new physics that could explain the large particle and anti-particle asymmetry. The experiment also tests the current Standard Model by searching for decays that are rare according to the Standard Model and checking if they are within the Standard Model predictions. However, the detector itself has inefficiencies, which need to be accounted for. In this thesis, we cast light on one such inefficiency; the misidentification of one type of particle (pion) as another particle (muon) by the detector. This means that in reality there is a pion but due to certain effects, the detector identifies it as muon and hence could give us wrong results. This misidentication problem cannot be solved for individual tracks, but must be studied to establish uncertainties of measured results. The results from this thesis are a first study of the pion-muon misidentication.
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