Creating and Analyzing Opposite Sign Dilepton Lepton Jet Dark Photon Plots and a Dark Photon Validation Plot
Session Number
Project ID: PHYS 20
Advisor(s)
Dr. Peter Dong, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
Discipline
Physical Science
Start Date
17-4-2024 9:40 AM
End Date
17-4-2024 9:55 AM
Abstract
The dark photon is predicted in an extension of the standard model to include a dark sector, to account for the mass of invisible dark matter and its lack of interaction with the standard model. This dark sector includes a massive U(1)’ gauge boson A’, or the dark photon, which can decay into standard model particles through kinetic mixing. Because of the mass of A’, when it decays into a standard model photon and eventually additional leptons, it produces a lepton jet. This lepton jet is easily detectable by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Through analysis of simulated and real data, this project details the creation of histograms through simulated Monte Carlo to plot the invariant mass of lepton jets coming from a fixed mass of a simulated dark photon against the number of said events. We also apply trigger cuts to eliminate consideration of events we know do not come from a dark photon but produce similar lepton jets. These plots show that we can accurately reconstruct events from the accelerator for our analysis. Furthermore, this project tracks the creation of dark photon validation histograms that graph opposite sign dilepton jet mass against the number of events, plotting both data and major background sources. Now, our analysis can compare our background accelerator data with signal events, and thereby evaluate the effectiveness of our triggers.
Creating and Analyzing Opposite Sign Dilepton Lepton Jet Dark Photon Plots and a Dark Photon Validation Plot
The dark photon is predicted in an extension of the standard model to include a dark sector, to account for the mass of invisible dark matter and its lack of interaction with the standard model. This dark sector includes a massive U(1)’ gauge boson A’, or the dark photon, which can decay into standard model particles through kinetic mixing. Because of the mass of A’, when it decays into a standard model photon and eventually additional leptons, it produces a lepton jet. This lepton jet is easily detectable by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Through analysis of simulated and real data, this project details the creation of histograms through simulated Monte Carlo to plot the invariant mass of lepton jets coming from a fixed mass of a simulated dark photon against the number of said events. We also apply trigger cuts to eliminate consideration of events we know do not come from a dark photon but produce similar lepton jets. These plots show that we can accurately reconstruct events from the accelerator for our analysis. Furthermore, this project tracks the creation of dark photon validation histograms that graph opposite sign dilepton jet mass against the number of events, plotting both data and major background sources. Now, our analysis can compare our background accelerator data with signal events, and thereby evaluate the effectiveness of our triggers.