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Schramm, Steven

The search for new particles is an important topic in modern particle physics. New stable massive particles are predicted by various models, including R-parity conserving variants of supersymmetry. The ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker can be used to look for charged stable massive particles by using the momentum and velocity of particles passing through the detector to calculate its mass. A program named TRTCHAMP has been written to perform this analysis. Recently, ATLAS changed their data retention policies to phase out the use of a particular format of output file created during reconstruction. TRTCHAMP relies on this file type, and therefore this change prevents the algorithm from working in its original state. However, this problem can be resolved by integrating TRTCHAMP into the official reconstruction, which has now been done. This paper documents the changes involved in integrating TRTCHAMP with the existing InDetLowBetaFinder reconstruction package. Topics discussed include the structure of reconstruction algorithms in ATLAS, the retrieval of calibration constants from the detector conditions database, and the parsing of necessary parameters from multiple reconstruction data containers. To conclude, the output of TRTCHAMP is shown to accurately estimate the velocity of protons in minimum bias tracks. Additionally, mass plots generated with the TRTCHAMP results are shown to agree with the known mass for both monte carlo and real protons in minimum bias tracks, and agreement is shown between the input and output masses for a monte carlo sample of 300 GeV R-Hadrons.

Text

University of British Columbia. PHYS 449

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0085965

Science, Faculty of; Physics and Astronomy, Department of

Schramm, Steven. 2011. Searching for Stable Massive Particles in the ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker. Undergraduate Honours Thesis. Department of Physics and Astronomy. University of British Columbia.

Undergraduate

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/