Lepton Flavor Violating decay and the τ→μμμ Search at the LHC
Open Access
Author:
Jaffe, Matthew Scott
Area of Honors:
Engineering Science
Degree:
Bachelor of Science
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Jun Huang, Thesis Supervisor Christine Masters, Thesis Honors Advisor Judith A Todd Copley, Faculty Reader
Keywords:
LHC CERN high energy physics particle physics flavor decay lepton
Abstract:
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest, highest-energy particle accelerator ever constructed. It accelerates two counter-circulating proton beams around a 27 km ring, currently colliding them at center-of-mass energy √s = 8 TeV. Many searches for new physics and tests of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics are being performed at the four detectors of the LHC. One of these detectors is the LHCb experiment, which seeks to catch glimpses of new physics through indirect means as a method of probing even higher energy scales. One candidate to yield such a glimpse is the observation of lepton flavor violating decays, such as the τ→μμμ decay. This thesis presents an analysis of the τ→μμμ decay; in particular, the effort to select the vanishingly rare candidate events from the overwhelming background.