Keywords: CERN, particle physics, LHCb, rare decays, beauty-quark
 

"Decoding Beauty: Rare baryonic decays & SciFi detector commissioning"

From the largest structures in the universe to the smallest atoms in our bodies, everything around us is made up of particles. At the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, these particles and their interactions are studied in detail. This dissertation describes the study of so-called "beauty" quarks at one of the detectors at the LHC ring, the LHCb experiment. Rare decays of beauty baryons, particles consisting of three quarks, are measured to test the theoretical Standard Model of particle physics and look for potential new physics beyond the Standard Model. In addition, this thesis covers the upgrade of the LHCb detector and the commissioning of the Scintillating Fibre (SciFi) tracking detector, one of the new sub-detectors in the experiment. A major challenge is the scanning and alignment of the electronic clocks. This thesis presents clock values at which all of the hundreds of thousands of channels within the SciFi detector can successfully operate.

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