Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detectors and the Rare Decay Bd -- K+0u+u_ at LHCb

The LHCb experiment is one of four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. It is the next generation of heavy flavour experiment, designed to study CP violating processes and rare decays in the B system and will benefit from the large b-quark production cross-section in ''S =14 T.eV protonproton collisions. This will enable LHCb to record large numbers of events even for rare decay modes such as Bd-K*IJ+IJ', with a branching fraction of 1.22+0 . 38 ,0.32 x 10-6, that is discussed in this thesis. This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the photon detectors of LHCb's Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detectors and their associated front-end electronics, discussing measurements made on these photon detectors during laboratory testing and culminating in a series of beam tests. The beam tests measured the performance of a 1/10th scale prototype RICH detector, providing an estimate for the combined efficiency of the HPD's binary readout and charge collection of Ecollection X Ereadout = 82�±3%. The second part of this thesis reports on LHCb's sensitivity to the decay as Bd-K*IJ+ IJ' in a Monte Carlo study with one nominal year (2 fb�·1) of data. With this data set (of 7000 events) LHCb should be able to make, for the first time, a precision measurement of the kinematic distribution of the particles in the decay that in many new physics models can have large departures from the Standard Model (SM) prediction. Particular attention is paid to the forward-backward asymmetry of the muons which changes with the invariant mass of the muon pair and crosses zero at a well defined value with small theoretical error in the SM. LHCb's precision on this zero crossing point is estimated at �±0.43 GeV2.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo