Daniel Arcaro -Precision Measurement of the Drell-Yan Process Using Upgraded Back-end Electronics

Speaker: Daniel Arcaro

When: May 3, 2016 (Tue), 11:00AM to 12:00PM (add to my calendar)
Location: SCI 352

This event is part of the Preliminary Oral Exam.

Examining Committee: Lawrence Sulak, Robert Carey, Sheldon Glashow, Karl Ludwig

Hardware Abstract:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has recently undergone upgrades to both the energy, 8 TeV to 13 TeV, and luminosity of the proton-proton beam. The original Versa Module Europa (VME) electronics designed 25 years ago in the Compact Muon Solenoid cannot handle the data flow associated with the LHC upgrades. Since the VME electronics are no longer manufactured and there are no spares CMS is redesigning the system using Telecommunications Architecture (TCA) crates. The TCA crates can handle the required bandwidth of the upgraded rates and hundreds of crates are now installed in many subsystems, including the Hadronic Calorimeter. Each of the TCA crates houses an AMC13 card built at Boston University that I propose to commission at BU and on site at CERN after I move there in the summer of 2016. In addition to this I am developing software to take advantage of the real time monitoring capabilities of the AMC13. This software will aid in locating problems in the detector while collisions occur and gather error statistics for future run improvements.

Analysis Abstract:

Understanding the Drell-Yan (DY) process at the LHC is an important task because it serves as a calibration for the detector plus contributes to the background of many new physics studies. DY has one of the largest cross sections and cleanest final states compared to other physical processes so it is readily available for precision measurement in CMS. Measurements include finding the parton distribution function of the proton, since DY is characteristically a deep-inelastic scattering event, and studying the electroweak coupling of the Z boson to quarks. More specifically Z-boson production plus one jet has recently been calculated to Next-Next Leading Order (NNLO) for 13 TeV and can be compared directly to collision data. I propose to first analyze the 8 TeV data set to confirm my results with published CMS material and then compare the theoretical NNLO results with my analysis at 13 TeV once the data has been obtained.