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The LHCb experiment is dedicated to making precision measurements involving beauty and charm hadrons at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The LHCb RICH detectors provide charged particle identification required to distinguish final states in many decays important to the LHCb physics programme. Time alignment of the RICH photon detectors is necessary in order to ensure a high photon collection efficiency. Using both a pulsed laser and proton-proton collision data the photon detectors are aligned to within 1 ns. The LHCb detector is uniquely positioned to measure production cross-sections at energies and rapidities inaccessible to other experiments. With 1.81 nb−1 of proton-proton collisions collected by the LHCb experiment in 2010 at center-of-mass energy √s = 7 TeV the production crosssection of D±s and D± mesons decaying to the φ{K+K−}π ± final state have been determined in bins of transverse momentum and rapidity. These measurements use a data-driven recursive optimisation technique to improve signal significance. The cross-section ratio is measured to be σ(D± ) σ(D± s ) = 2.32±0.27(stat)±0.26(syst), consistent with the ratio of charm-quark hadronisation fractions to D± and D±s mesons. Time-dependent interference between mixing of B0s -B0s mesons and decay to the final state J/ψφ gives rise to a CP violating phase φs. This phase is constrained to be small within the Standard Model, a significant deviation from which would be a signal of new physics. φs has been measured with 0.37 fb−1 of protonproton collision data recorded during 2011 by the LHCb experiment. Isolation of the signal distribution is achieved using the S-plot technique, and the analysis accounts for inclusive B0s →J/ψK+K− s-wave contributions. The measured value of φs = 0.16±0.18(stat)±0.06(syst) rad is the most precise measurement to date, and is consistent with Standard Model predictions.

Many ATLAS analyses study events with muons in them including those searching for the Higgs boson and new physics. Cosmics muons, however, can also occasionally enter the detector and mimic the trajectory of a muon from one of the collisions produced by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. By understanding the different ways ATLAS triggers on, collects, reconstructs, and analyses data from cosmic rays and collisions, the flux of cosmic muons with transverse momenta above 20 GeV in the central region of the detector was measured to be 1.34 ± 0.06 (stat.) s^−1 m^−2 . At the same time the cosmic muon charge ratio has been measured to be 1.3 ± 0.1 (stat.). This measurement of the cosmic muon flux in ATLAS is the first step in quantifying the sizes of the cosmic muon backgrounds to various physics analyses that look for events with muons. / Graduate

This thesis presents the design qualification and construction of the Beam Scintillator Counter (BSC) for the CMS Collaboration at CERN in 2007 - 2008. The BSC detector is designed to aid in the commissioning of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) during the first 2 years of operation and provide technical triggering for beam halo and minimum-bias events. Using plastic scintillator tiles mounted at both ends of CMS, it will detect minimum ionizing particles through the low-to-mid luminosity phases of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) commissioning. During these early phases, the BSC will provide probably the most interesting and widely used data of any of the CMS sub-detectors and will be employed in the track based alignment procedure of the central tracker and commissioning of the Forward Hadron Calorimeter.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Canterbury, 2008. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (p. [167]-170). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Northeastern University, 2008. / Title from title page (viewed March 9, 2009). Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Physics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-123).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Physics and Astronomy." Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis outlines the search for neutral Higgs bosons in a mass range of m_H/A = 200 GeV − 1.2 TeV, decaying to a pair of hadronically decaying tau leptons. The search is performed using √s = 13 TeV proton-proton collision data, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3.21 fb^-1, recorded by the ATLAS detector. No excess over the predicted Standard Model background is observed and upper limits are placed on the production cross section times branching fraction as a function of the mass of the scalar resonance. When combined with the results of the analysis where one of the tau leptons decays to either a muon or electron, the 95% confidence level upper limit on the cross section times branching fraction ranges from 1.4 pb at m_H/A = 200 GeV to 0.025 pb at m_H/A = 1.2 TeV for a scalar boson produced via gluon-gluon fusion, and 1.6 pb at m_H/A = 200 GeV to 0.028 pb at m_H/A = 1.2 TeV for a scalar boson produced via b-associated production. The results are interpreted in the Minimal Supersymmetric extension to the Standard Model (MSSM) as a limit on the value of tanβ, as a function of the mass of the neutral CP-odd MSSM Higgs boson. In the mmod+ scenario, the 95% confidence level upper limit is tanβ < 7.6 for m_A = 200 GeV, and tanβ < 47 for m_A = 1 TeV. For the mass range m_A > 500 GeV, the upper limit on tanβ is improved in comparison to previous ATLAS searches.

In the high energy environment of the Large Hadron Collider, there is a finite probability for the longitudinal tail of the hadronic shower represented by a jet to leak out of the calorimeter, commonly referred to as longitudinal hadronic shower leakage, or jet 'punchthrough'. This thesis prescribes a method for identifying such 'punch-through' jets via the use of muon activity found behind a jet in the ATLAS muon spectrometer, finding an occurrence rate of up to 18% in the worst affected regions. 'Punch-through' jets were found to degrade the measured jet energy scale by up to 30%, and jet energy resolution by a factor of 3. A correction to remove these effects was developed in Monte Carlo and validated in data, with associated systematic uncertainties derived. The correction was found to negate the degradation of the measured jet energy scale, improving the jet energy resolution by up to 10% in the worst affected regions, and up to 1.6% overall. The correction was integrated into the final 2012 ATLAS jet energy calibration scheme as the fifth step of the Global Sequential corrections. The prescription developed in this thesis to derive the correction is currently being used by ATLAS in Run II of the Large Hadron Collider.

When calculating scattering processes in theories involving massless gauge bosons, such as gluons in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), one encounters infrared (IR), or soft, divergences. To obtain precise predictions, it is important to have exact expressions for these IR divergences, which are present in any on-shell scattering amplitude. Due to their long wavelength, soft gluons factorise with respect to short-distance, or hard, interactions and can be captured by correlators of semi-infinite Wilson lines. The latter obey a renormalisation group equation, which gives rise to exponentiation. The exponent can be represented diagrammatically in terms of weighted sums of Feynman diagrams, called webs. A web with L external legs, each with ni gluon attachments, is denoted (n1; n2; : : : ; nL). In this way all soft gluon interactions can be described by a soft anomalous dimension. It is currently known at three loops with lightlike kinematics, and at two loops with general kinematics. Our work is a step towards a three-loop result in general kinematics. In recent years, much progress has been made in understanding the general physical properties of scattering amplitudes and in exploiting these properties to calculate specific amplitudes. At the same time, we have discovered a lot of structure underpinning the space of multiple polylogarithms, the functions in terms of which most known amplitudes can be written. General properties include analyticity, implying that scattering amplitudes are analytic functions except on certain branch cuts, and unitarity, or conservation of probability. These two properties are both exploited by unitarity cuts. Unitarity cuts provide a diagrammatic way of calculating the discontinuities of a Feynman diagram across its branch cuts, which is often simpler than calculating the diagram itself. From this discontinuity, the original function can be reconstructed by performing a dispersive integral. In this work, we extend the formalism of unitarity cuts to incorporate diagrams involving Wilson-line propagators, where the inverse propagator is linear in the loop momenta, rather than the quadratic case which has been studied before. To exploit this for the calculation of the soft anomalous dimension, we first found a suitable momentum-space IR regulator and corresponding prescription, and then derived the appropriate largest time equation (LTE). We find that, as in the case of the scalar diagrams, most terms contributing to the LTE turn out to be zero, albeit for different reasons. This simplifies calculations considerably. This formalism is then applied to the calculation of webs with non-lightlike Wilson lines. As a test, we first looked at webs that have been previously studied using other methods. It emerges that, when using the correct variables, the dispersive integrals one encounters here are trivial, illustrating why unitarity cuts are a particularly useful tool for the calculation of webs. We observe that our technique is especially efficient when looking at diagrams involving three-gluon vertices, such as the (1; 1; 1) web and the Y diagram between two lines. We then focus on three-loop diagrams connecting three or four external non-lightlike lines and involving a three-gluon vertex. We calculate the previously unknown three-loop three-leg (1; 1; 3) web in general kinematics. We obtain a result which agrees with the recently calculated lightlike limit. We also develop a technique to test our results numerically using the computer program SecDec, and we find agreement with our analytical result. The result for the (1; 1; 3) web can then be exploited to gain insight into the more complicated three-loop four-leg (1; 1; 1; 2) web. Indeed, the (1; 1; 1; 2) web reduces to the (1; 1; 3) web in a certain collinear limit. We propose an ansatz for the (1; 1; 1; 2) web in general kinematics, based on a conjectured basis of multiple polylogarithms. The result for the (1; 1; 3) web, together with the known result for the lightlike limit of the (1; 1; 1; 2) web, imposes strong constraints on the ansatz. Using these constraints, we manage to fix all but four coefficients in the ansatz. We fit the remaining coefficients numerically, but find that the quality of the fit is not good. We find possible explanations for this poor quality. This calculation is still a work in progress. Our results provide a major step towards the full calculation of the three-loop soft anomalous dimension for non-lightlike Wilson lines. We calculated new results for three-loop webs, and also deepened the understanding of webs in general. We confirm a conjecture about the functional dependence of the soft anomalous dimension on the cusp angles. We also confirm earlier findings about the symbol alphabet of the relevant functions. This confirms the remarkable simplicity found earlier in the expressions for the soft anomalous dimension.