whereRU: Aresty Poster 121 - Searching for Fourth Generation Quarks by Aresty Posters 2009

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and most advanced particle accelerator on the planet. One of the primary experiments is the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), which uses a detector to track and to measure the energies of particles produced in proton-proton collisions. Since the LHC is not yet running, we generated our own events using a Monte Carlo simulation. We utilized the ROOT plotting and graphing package to sort the simulated data into histograms and to plot distributions of the particles involved in the multitude of events. This analysis process is used to search for the existence of fourth generation heavy quarks, dubbed b-prime. By studying the chain of events and processes that could possibly stem from the decay of b-primes, we knew to look for events that resulted in 2 isolated same-sign muons produced by W+ and W- particles. The key to this analysis was guaranteeing that muons detected were isolated, meaning that they were distant from other neighboring particles. The results of these preliminary analyses lets us know what kinds of backgrounds and events we can expect to see when real data is generated. This work aims to further the understanding of the fundamental structure of the universe and its interactions.

Roel D. Mercado: rdmerq@eden.rutgers.edu
Edward Ronan: ronan@eden.rutgers.edu
Dr. Steve Schnetzer: steves@physics.rutgers.edu