Analysis Of D0 K Pi Pi0 Decays

Physics is Fun: Memoirs of a Life in Physics

PRELIMINARY STUDY OF D0 ---] K PI PI0 DECAYS WITH DALITZ PLOTS.

Particle physicists study the smallest particles and most basic rules of their interactions in humankind's current scope. The Charm Analysis Working Group (CWG) of the BaBar Collaboration studies decays involving the charm quark. They currently study mixing in D decays, an interesting and poorly understood phenomenon in current physics models. We, as part of the CWG, investigated the plausibility of using Dalitz plots and the BaBar analysis framework to study mixing in Wrong Sign (WS) D[sup 0][yields] K[pi][pi][sup 0] decays. Others in the CWG have studied mixing in the 2-body decay, D[sup 0][yields] K[pi]. The 3-body decay analyzed with the RooFitDalitz analysis package and Dalitz plots provides more information and another way of separating Doubly Cabibbo Suppressed Decays (DCSD) from mixing--which share the same end products. Through doing many simulations, we have demonstrated the usefulness of this approach. We selected D[sup 0][yields] K[pi][pi][sup 0] events from Simulation Production run No. 4 (SP4) and BaBar's run 1 and run 2. We made Dalitz plots with this data. Now that we better understand Dalitz plots and software, we plan to select WS D[sup 0][yields] K[pi][pi][sup 0] events and perform rate fits as discussed in BaBar Analysis Document (BAD) No. 443, as well as fits for several different decay times and resonances, in order to further distinguish DCSD from mixing.

Study of the Electroweak Symmetry Breaking Sector for the LHC

In this dissertation, we revisit the prospects of a strongly interacting theory for the Electroweak Symmetry Breaking Sector of the Standard Model, after the discovery of a Higgs-like boson at 125GeV. As the LHC constrains new phenomena near the Higgs mass, it is natural to assume that the new scale is of order 1TeV. This mass gap might indicate strongly interacting new physics. This work is of quite general validity and model independence. With only a few parameters at the Lagrangian level, multiple channels (possibly with new physics resonances) are describable, and many BSM theories can be treated. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers, and is accessible to newcomers in the field. Many calculations are given in full detail and there are ample graphical illustrations.