U Cincinnati Abstract 2014 - Large Hadron Collider beauty Particle Analysis

T. Baker, K. Debry, B. Shen, R. Swertfeger
D. Whittington (Fairfield High School)
M.Sokoloff (University of Cincinnati)

The purpose of our research was to identify signal and background ranges of particle masses in high energy decays from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb), and to compare these masses to those recorded by the Particle Data Group (PDG) in order to confirm particle identification. We studied Ω_b^- to J/Ψ Ω^- , Ω_b^- to Ξ^- D⁰, and  Ξ_b⁰ to J/Ψ Ξ⁰(1530) decay channels by plotting particle properties such as momentum, probability of particle, lifetime, energy, mass, and invariant mass using 1D and 2D histograms. We used a linux terminal and ROOT program to write code in C++ that enabled us to graph and manipulate the large amount of data we were given. We applied many cuts on variables such as decay time and mass, fit the peaks with a gaussian fit, and compared the peaks to the mass values given by PDG. Our Ω_b^- mass was slightly different from that of LHCb’s recent studies, and should be further explored. We searched for but did not find the Ξ_b⁰ to J/Ψ Ξ⁰(1530) decay  through invariant mass plots. Additional research should be done to search for evidence of the  Ξ_b⁰ to J/Ψ Ξ⁰(1530) decay, and to verify the mass of Ω_b^- .