Tara Shears

Physics with the CDF detector

CDF is one of two general purpose particle detectors at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator. It detects and records data from proton antiproton interactions at the highest centre-of-mass energies in the world, and provides an ideal opportunity to explore particle physics in a hadronic environment.

I have a particular interest in physics channels that yield b quarks. Previous studies of b quark production at Run 1 showed a potential discrepancy when compared to QCD predictions. If true, this observation could signal the first hint of physics beyond the Standard Model. Understanding b quark production and detection is thus of paramount importance. We (Anant Gajjar, Ronan McNulty and myself) developed a novel method to determine b identification efficiency purely from data, which will be used to measure b production. We also measure the production rate of photons produced in conjunction with heavy quarks - not only is this a valuable test of QCD, but also a topology that can be significantly enriched by New Physics (eg. supersymmetry) contributions.

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