Measurement of top quark pairs production cross-section in the semi-leptonic channel with the ATLAS experiment

This thesis is about three major aspects of the identification of top quarks. First comes the understanding of their production mechanism, their decay channels and how to translate theoretical formulae into programs that can simulate such physical processes using Monte Carlo techniques. In particular, the author has been involved in the introduction of the POWHEG generator in the framework of the ATLAS experiment. POWHEG is now fully used as the benchmark program for the simulation of ttbar pairs production and decay, along with MC@NLO and AcerMC: this will be shown in chapter one. The second chapter illustrates the ATLAS detectors and its sub-units, such as calorimeters and muon chambers. It is very important to evaluate their efficiency in order to fully understand what happens during the passage of radiation through the detector and to use this knowledge in the calculation of final quantities such as the ttbar production cross section. The last part of this thesis concerns the evaluation of this quantity deploying the so-called "golden channel" of ttbar decays, yielding one energetic charged lepton, four particle jets and a relevant quantity of missing transverse energy due to the neutrino. The most important systematic errors arising from the various part of the calculation are studied in detail. Jet energy scale, trigger efficiency, Monte Carlo models, reconstruction algorithms and luminosity measurement are examples of what can contribute to the uncertainty about the cross-section.

Sensitivity of the Top quark mass measurement with the CMS experiment at LHC using t-tbar multijet simulated events

This thesis comes after a strong contribution on the realization of the CMS computing system, which can be seen as a relevant part of the experiment itself. A physics analysis completes the road from Monte Carlo production and analysis tools realization to the final physics study which is the actual goal of the experiment. The topic of physics work of this thesis is the study of tt events fully hadronic decay in the CMS experiment. A multi-jet trigger has been provided to fix a reasonable starting point, reducing the multi-jet sample to the nominal trigger rate. An offline selection has been provided to reduce the S/B ratio. The b-tag is applied to provide a further S/B improvement. The selection is applied to the background sample and to the samples generated at different top quark masses. The top quark mass candidate is reconstructed for all those samples using a kinematic fitter. The resulting distributions are used to build p.d.f.’s, interpolating them with a continuous arbitrary curve. These curves are used to perform the top mass measurement through a likelihood comparison

Evaluation of a multi variated analysis for the selection of t-tbar multijet events in the current CMS implemented environment at LHC

In the present study we are using multi variate analysis techniques to discriminate signal from background in the fully hadronic decay channel of ttbar events. We give a brief introduction to the role of the Top quark in the standard model and a general description of the CMS Experiment at LHC. We have used the CMS experiment computing and software infrastructure to generate and prepare the data samples used in this analysis. We tested the performance of three different classifiers applied to our data samples and used the selection obtained with the Multi Layer Perceptron classifier to give an estimation of the statistical and systematical uncertainty on the cross section measurement.

Measurement of K(892)*0 resonance production in Pb-Pb collisions with the ALICE experiment at the LHC

The analysis of the K(892)*0 resonance production in Pb–Pb collisions at √sNN = 2.76 TeV with the ALICE detector at the LHC is presented. The analysis is motivated by the interest in the measurement of short-lived resonances production that can provide insights on the properties of the medium produced in heavy-ion collisions both during its partonic (Quark-Gluon Plasma) and hadronic phase. This particular analysis exploits particle identification of the ALICE Time-Of-Flight detector. The ALICE experiment is presented, with focus on the performance of the Time-Of-Flight system. The aspects of calibration and data quality controls are discussed in detail, while illustrating the excellent and very stable performance of the system in different collision environments at the LHC. A full analysis of the K*0 resonance production is presented: from the resonance reconstruction to the determination of the efficiency and the systematic uncertainty. The results show that the analysis strategy discussed is a valid tool to measure the K∗0 up to intermediate momenta. Preliminary results on K*0 resonance production at the LHC are presented and confirmed to be a powerful tool to study the physics of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

Measurement of the $B^0$ - $\bar{B}^0$ and $B^0_s$ - $\bar{B}^0_s$ production asymmetries in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV and $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV with the LHCb experiment

The production rate of $b$ and $\bar{b}$ hadrons in $pp$ collisions are not expected to be strictly identical, due to imbalance between quarks and anti-quarks in the initial state. This phenomenon can be naively related to the fact that the $\bar{b}$ quark produced in the hard scattering might combine with a $u$ or $d$ valence quark from the colliding protons, whereas the same cannot happen for a $b$ quark. This thesis presents the analysis performed to determine the production asymmetries of $B^0$ and $B^0_s$. The analysis relies on data samples collected by the LHCb detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during the 2011 and 2012 data takings at two different values of the centre of mass energy $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV and at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV, corresponding respectively to an integrated luminosity of 1 fb$^{-1}$ and of 2 fb$^{-1}$. The production asymmetry is one of the key ingredients to perform measurements of $CP$ violation in b-hadron decays at the LHC, since $CP$ asymmetries must be disentangled from other sources. The measurements of the production asymmetries are performed in bins of $p_\mathrm{T}$ and $\eta$ of the $B$-meson. The values of the production asymmetries, integrated in the ranges $4 < p_\mathrm{T} < 30$ GeV/c and $2.5<\eta<4.5$, are determined to be: \begin{equation} A_\mathrm{P}(\B^0)= (-1.00\pm0.48\pm0.29)\%,\nonumber \end{equation} \begin{equation} A_\mathrm{P}(\B^0_s)= (\phantom{-}1.09\pm2.61\pm0.61)\%,\nonumber \end{equation} where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic. The measurement of $A_\mathrm{P}(B^0)$ is performed using the full statistics collected by LHCb so far, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3 fb$^{-1}$, while the measurement of $A_\mathrm{P}(B^0_s)$ is realized with the first 1 fb$^{-1}$, leaving room for improvement. No clear evidence of dependences on the values of $p_\mathrm{T}$ and $\eta$ is observed. The results presented in this thesis are the most precise measurements available up to date.