Professor Daniela Bortoletto

Abstract:

The first measurement of the cross section for top-quark pair production in pp collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at center-of-mass energy s=7 TeV has been performed using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3.1±0.3 pb-1 recorded by the CMS detector. This result utilizes the final state with two isolated, highly energetic charged leptons, large missing transverse energy, and two or more jets. Backgrounds from Drell-Yan and non-W/Z boson production are estimated from data. Eleven events are observed in the data with 2.1±1.0 events expected from background. The measured cross section is 194±72(stat.)±24(syst.)±21(lumi.) pb, consistent with next-to-leading order predictions. © 2010 CERN.

Abstract:

The results of the first search for long-lived gluinos produced in 7 TeV pp collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider are presented. The search looks for evidence of long-lived particles that stop in the CMS detector and decay in the quiescent periods between beam crossings. In a dataset with a peak instantaneous luminosity of 1×1032cm-2s-1, an integrated luminosity of 10pb-1, and a search interval corresponding to 62 hours of LHC operation, no significant excess above background was observed. Limits at the 95% confidence level on gluino pair production over 13 orders of magnitude of gluino lifetime are set. For a mass difference m g-mχ10>100GeV/c2, and assuming BR(g→gχ10)= 100%, mg<370GeV/c2 are excluded for lifetimes from 10μs to 1000 s. © 2010 The American Physical Society.

Abstract:

A search for excited leptons is carried out with the CMS detector at the LHC, using 36 pb-1 of pp collision data recorded at s=7 TeV. The search is performed for associated production of a lepton and an oppositely charged excited lepton pp→ℓℓ*, followed by the decay ℓ*→ℓγ, resulting in the ℓℓγ final state, where ℓ=e,μ. No excess of events above the standard model expectation is observed. Interpreting the findings in the context of ℓ* production through four-fermion contact interactions and subsequent decay via electroweak processes, first upper limits are reported for ℓ* production at this collision energy. The exclusion region in the compositeness scale Λ and excited lepton mass Mℓ* parameter space is extended beyond previously established limits. For Λ=Mℓ*, excited lepton masses are excluded below 1070 GeV/c2 for e* and 1090 GeV/c2 for μ* at the 95% confidence level. © 2011 CERN.

Abstract:

Measurements of primary charged hadron multiplicity distributions are presented for non-single-diffractive events in proton-proton collisions at centre-of-mass energies of √s = 0.9, 2.36, and 7TeV, in five pseudorapidity ranges from |η| < 0.5 to |η| < 2.4. The data were collected with the minimum-bias trigger of the CMS experiment during the LHC commissioning runs in 2009 and the 7TeV run in 2010. The multiplicity distribution at √s = 0.9 TeV is in agreement with previous measurements. At higher energies the increase of the mean multiplicity with √s is underestimated by most event generators. The average transverse momentum as a function of the multiplicity is also presented. The measurement of higher-order moments of the multiplicity distribution confirms the violation of Koba-Nielsen-Olesen scaling that has been observed at lower energies.