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School of Physical and Chemical Sciences

Measurement of low mass dimuon pairs

Research Group: Particle Physics Research Centre
Number of Students: 1
Length of Study in Years: 3-4
Full-time Project: no

Funding

Discuss with supervisor and/or admissions tutor

Project Description

The differential cross section of the Drell-Yan (q+qbar--> Z/gamma --> mu+mu-) process in the di-muon mass allows a precise test of the perturbative QCD to me made. At low invariant mass of the muons the cross section is sensitive to a novel region of kinematic phase space, namely low momentum fractions (x) of the incoming quark with respect to the proton's momentum. A value of x below 10^-4 is attainable and in this region we may expect new QCD effects to appear which could be related to the onset of QCD confinement - an unsolved problem in particle physics. The measurement suffers from a very large background arising from muons from b and c quark meson decays. A detailed understanding and suppression of this background is essential.

 

Comments: 

Publications from my previous work in this area:   10.1007/JHEP06(2014)112

PhD Theses from my previous students: 

Requirements

Student expected to travel frequently to Geneva, and possibly spent 1 year at CERN depending on funding.
Excellent programming skills in C++, python, linux/unix

SPCS Academics: Eram Rizvi