This thesis presents an indirect measurement of the width of the W boson using data collected at the D0 experiment, a multipurpose particle detector utilizing the Fermilab Tevatron. The W width was determined from the ratio of W {yields} {mu}{nu} to Z {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -} cross sections to be {Gamma}{sub W} = 2168 {+-} 22(stat) {+-} 62(syst){sub -16}{sup +24}(pdf) {+-} 4(other) MeV, in good agreement with the Standard Model prediction and other experimental measurements. In addition there is a description of how work made towards this measurement has been used to improve the parameterized detector simulation, a vital tool in the obtention of physics results from signals observed in the detector, and in estimating the uncertainty due to choice of PDF, which is of interest for all measurements made at hadron colliders.

Sum frequency generation (SFG) surface vibrational spectroscopy was used to characterize interfaces pertinent to current surface engineering applications, such as thin film polymers and novel catalysts. An array of advanced surface science techniques like scanning probe microscopy (SPM), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), gas chromatography (GC) and electron microscopy were used to obtain experimental measurements complementary to SFG data elucidating polymer and catalyst surface composition, surface structure, and surface mechanical behavior. Experiments reported in this dissertation concentrate on three fundamental questions: (1) How does the interfacial molecular structure differ from that of the bulk in real world applications? (2) How do differences in chemical environment affect interface composition or conformation? (3) How do these changes correlate to properties such as mechanical or catalytic performance? The density, surface energy and bonding at a solid interface dramatically alter the polymer configuration, physics and mechanical properties such as surface glass transition, adhesion and hardness. The enhanced sensitivity of SFG at the buried interface is applied to three systems: a series of acrylates under compression, the compositions and segregation behavior of binary polymer polyolefin blends, and the changes in surface structure of a hydrogel as a function of hydration. In addition, a catalytically active thin …

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I have performed a search for t-channel single top quark production in p{bar p} collisions at 1.96 TeV on a 366 pb{sup -1} dataset collected with the D0 detector from 2002-2005. The analysis is restricted to the leptonic decay of the W boson from the top quark to an electron or muon, tq{bar b} {yields} lv{sub l}b q{bar b} (l = e,{mu}). A powerful b-quark tagging algorithm derived from neural networks is used to identify b jets and significantly reduce background. I further use neural networks to discriminate signal from background, and apply a binned likelihood calculation to the neural network output distributions to derive the final limits. No direct observation of single top quark production has been made, and I report expected/measured 95% confidence level limits of 3.5/8.0 pb.

The work exposed in this thesis deals with the search for electroweak production of top quark (single top) in proton-antiproton collisions at {radical}s = 1.96 TeV. This production mode has not been observed yet. Analyzed data have been collected during the Run II of the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. These data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 370 pb{sup -1}. In the Standard Model, the decay of a top quark always produce a high momentum bottom quark. Therefore bottom quark jets identification plays a major role in this analysis. The large lifetime of b hadrons and the subsequent large impact parameters relative to the interaction vertex of charged particle tracks are used to tag bottom quark jets. Impact parameters of tracks attached to a jet are converted into the probability for the jet to originate from the primary vertex. This algorithm has a 45% tagging efficiency for a 0.5% mistag rate. Two processes (s and t channels) dominate single top production with slightly different final states. The searched signature consists in 2 to 4 jets with at least one bottom quark jet, one charged lepton (electron or muon) and missing energy accounting for a neutrino. This final …

Sum frequency generation (SFG), a second-order nonlinear optical process, is electric-dipole forbidden in systems with inversion symmetry. As a result, it has been used to study chiral media and interfaces, systems intrinsically lacking inversion symmetry. This thesis describes recent progresses in the applications of and new insights into SFG from chiral media and interfaces. SFG from solutions of chiral amino acids is investigated, and a theoretical model explaining the origin and the strength of the chiral signal in electronic-resonance SFG spectroscopy is discussed. An interference scheme that allows us to distinguish enantiomers by measuring both the magnitude and the phase of the chiral SFG response is described, as well as a chiral SFG microscope producing chirality-sensitive images with sub-micron resolution. Exploiting atomic and molecular parity nonconservation, the SFG process is also used to solve the Ozma problems. Sum frequency vibrational spectroscopy is used to obtain the adsorption behavior of leucine molecules at air-water interfaces. With poly(tetrafluoroethylene) as a model system, we extend the application of this surface-sensitive vibrational spectroscopy to fluorine-containing polymers.

The authors present a search for single top quarks produced in the s-channel electroweak production mode. The search is performed in the electron+jets decay channels, with one or more secondary-vertex tagged jets to indicate the presence of a b-jet and hence improving the signal:background ratio. Separation between signal and background is further enhanced by the use of Feed Forward Neural networks. 360 pb{sup -1} of Run II data used for this analysis was delivered by the Tevatron, and collected by D0 between August 2002 and August 2004. The resulting 95% confidence level upper limit is 4 pb.

During the last decades, particle physicists have studied the tiniest building blocks of matter--the quarks and the leptons--and the forces between them in great detail. From these experiments, a theoretical framework has been built that describes the observed results with high precision. The achievement of this theory, which is referred to as the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, was the elaboration of a unified description of the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces in the framework of quantum gauge-field theories. Moreover, the Standard Model combines the weak and electromagnetic forces in a single electroweak gauge theory. The fourth force which is realized in nature, gravity, is too weak to be observable in laboratory experiments carried out in high-energy particle physics and is not part of the Standard Model. Although the Standard Model has proven highly successful in correlating a huge amount of experimental results, a key ingredient is as yet untested: the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking. Currently, the only viable ansatz that is compatible with observation is the Higgs mechanism. It predicts the existence of a scalar particle, called the Higgs boson, and the couplings to the fundamental Standard Model particles, however not its mass. An upper limit on …

A search was conducted for evidence of large extra dimensions (LED) at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Tevatron using the D0 detector. The Tevatron is a p{bar p} collider at a center of mass energy of 1.96 TeV. Events with particles escaping into extra dimensions will have large missing energy. The search was carried out using data from a total luminosity of 197 {+-} 13 pb{sup -1} with an observable high transverse momentum photon and a large transverse missing energy. The 70 observed events are consistent with photons produced by standard known reactions plus other background processes produced by cosmic muons. The mass limits on the fundamental mass scale at 95% confidence level for large extra dimensions of 2, 4, 6 and 8 are 500 GeV, 581 GeV, 630 GeV, and 668 GeV respectively.

The D0 experiment is based at the Tevatron, which is currently the world's highest-energy accelerator. The detector comprises three major subsystems: the tracking system, the calorimeter and the muon detector. Jets, seen in the calorimeter, are the most common product of the proton-proton interactions at 2TeV. This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on jets and describes the derivation of a jet energy scale using p{bar p} {yields} (Z + jets) events as a cross-check of the official D0 jet energy scale (Versions 4.2 and 5.1) which is derived using p{bar p} {yields} {gamma} + jets events. Closure tests were also carried out on the jet energy calibration as a further verification. Jets from b-quarks are commonly produced at D0, readily identified and are a useful physics tool. These require a special correction in the case where the b-jet decays via a muon and a neutrino. Thus a semileptonic correction was also derived as an addition to the standard energy correction for jets. The search for the Higgs boson is one of the largest physics programs at D0. The second part of this thesis describes a search for the Standard Model Higgs boson in the ZH …

Results obtained from a search for the trilepton signature {mu}{mu}{ell} (with {ell} = e, or {mu}) are combined with two complementary searches for the trilepton signatures ee{ell} and eer and interpreted in the framework of R-parity violating Supersymmetry. Pairwise, R-parity conserving production of the supersymmetric particles is assumed, followed by R-parity violating decays via an LL{bar E}-operator with one dominant coupling {lambda}{sub 122}. An LL{bar E}-operator couples two weak isospin doublet and one singlet (s)lepton fields and thus violates lepton number conservation. The data, collected with the D0 detector at the Fermilab proton-antiproton collider Tevatron, corresponds to an integrated luminosity of {integral} L dt = 360 {+-} 23 pb{sup -1}. No evident is observed, while 0.41 {+-} 0.11(stat) {+-} 0.07(sys) events are expected from Standard Model processes. The resulting 95% confidence level cross section limits on new physics producing a {mu}{mu}{ell} signature in the detector are of the order of 0.020 to 0.136 pb. They are interpreted in two different supersymmetry scenarios: the mSUGRA and the MSSM model. The corresponding lower limits on the masses of the lightest neutralino ({tilde {chi}}{sub 1}{sup 0}) and the lightest chargino ({tilde {chi}}{sub 1}{sup {+-}}) in case of the mSUGRA model are found to …

Supersymmetry is one of the most natural extensions of the Standard Model. At low energy it may consist in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model which is the framework chosen to perform the search of the stop with 350 pb{sup -1} of data collected by D0 during the RunIIa period of the TeVatron. They selected the events with an electron, a muon, missing transverse energy and non-isolated tracks, signature for the stop decay in 3-body ({bar t} {yields} bl{bar {nu}}). Since no significant excess of signal is seen, the results are interpreted in terms of limit on the stop production cross-sections, in such a way that they extend the existing exclusion region in the parameter space (m{sub {bar t}},m{sub {bar {nu}}}) up to stop masses of 168 (140) GeV for sneutrino masses of 50 (94) GeV. Finally because of the crucial role of the electromagnetic calorimeter, a fine calibration was performed using Z {yields} e{sup +}e{sup -} events, which improved significantly the energy resolution.