Thesis

Pion- and Kaon-induced Drell-Yan cross section at the AMBER experiment from CERN/SPS

• Call:

  PT-CERN Call 2022/2

• Academic Year:

  2022

• Domain:

  Astroparticle Physics

• Supervisor:

  Catarina Quintans

• Co-Supervisor:

  Pedro Abreu

• Institution:

  Instituto Superior Técnico (Universidade de Lisboa)

• Host Institution:

  Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas

• Abstract:

  The AMBER experiment is a fixed-target experiment at SPS, CERN. It was recently approved, and one of the physics goals is to study the pion- and kaon-induced Drell-Yan process. This process allows privileged access to the pion and kaon structure. At AMBER the valence, sea, and gluon contributions in the pion will be characterised with unprecedented accuracy, using high-intensity pion beams of both charges impinging in different nuclear targets. The simultaneously collected kaon-induced samples will provide input for the until now basically unknown kaon structure. This proposal aims to analyse data from Monte-Carlo simulations and AMBER physics Runs. Machine learning techniques will be tested and/or developed to address different aspects of the analysis, like the dimuon acceptance calculation in N-dimensions space; beam particle identification using Cherenkov counter detectors (CEDARs); and process separation for improvement of the Drell-Yan signal purity. The effectiveness of these methods will be compared to the standard dimuon approaches used so far. The work plan foresees an important CERN on-site presence, since the student will actively participate in the preparation and detector commissioning, and on the data-taking, during the beam tests and physics Runs of AMBER.