Tara Shears

Physics with the CDF detector

CDF was one of two general purpose particle detectors at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator. It detected and recorded data from proton antiproton interactions at what, pre-LHC, were the highest centre-of-mass energies in the world, and provided an ideal opportunity to explore particle physics in a hadronic environment.

In CDF, I had 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 was thus of paramount importance. We (Anant Gajjar, Ronan McNulty and myself) developed a novel method to determine b identification efficiency purely from data, which was used to measure b production. We also measured the production rate of photons produced in conjunction with heavy quarks - not only a valuable test of QCD, but also a topology that can be significantly enriched by New Physics (eg. supersymmetry) contributions.

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