Measurements of charm production and CP violation with the LHCb detector

Abstract

This thesis presents two measurements made using data collected by the LHCbdetector, operating at the Large Hadron Collider accelerator at the CERN particle physicslaboratory.The first is a measurement of the production rates of promptly producedD0, D+, Ds+, and D*+ open charm mesons, using datacollected in 2015 at a proton-proton centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s) = 13 TeV.The second is a search for direct CP violation in two three-body decays ofthe Lambda_c charm baryon, pKK and ppipi, using data collected in 2011 atsqrt(s) = 7 TeV and in 2012 at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV.For each measurement, motivation and context are given from the standpoint ofimproving the theoretical understanding of the Standard Model and searching for signsof physics that cannot be explained by it, and then the various statisticalanalysis techniques used to extract physical quantities from the data areexplained.The systematic limitations of the method are explored and quantified, and thenthe results are presented.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	George Lafferty (Supervisor)