Elementary Particles and Fields and String Theory Commons^™

Using Heavy Flavors To Study New Physics, Kristopher Jason Healey

Wayne State University Dissertations

In this doctoral dissertation I discuss the possible standard model contributions to select leptonic heavy meson decay modes. Included are calculations of soft photon contributions to a di-lepton decay of B-mesons as well as two-particle hadronic unitary contributions to the rare di-leptonic decay of the neutral D meson. Additionally, constraints are calculated for two super-WIMP dark matter models from rare heavy flavor decays.

A Search For The Sm Higgs Boson In The Process Zhllbb In 4.1/Fb Of Cdf Ii Data, Shalhout Zaki Shalhout

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation presents a search for the standard model (SM) Higgs boson in the associated production process ZH → l⁺l_- bb using 4.1fb^-1 of Tevatron collision data collected with the CDF II detector.

To increase the sensitivity to a ZH signal over previous CDF searches, we implement new electron and expanded b-jet identification algorithms.

We utilize neural network classifiers enhanced with matrix element probabilities, a b-jet identifying neural network, and multivariate jet energy corrections to maximize the separation of signal from SM backgrounds.

We employ three neural network classifiers separately optimized for each of our three …