Thesis Committee: Mark Kruse, Haiyan Gao, Ashutosh Kotwal, and Seog Oh (exofficio non-voting member)
ABSTRACT:
The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to measure Nature at the energy scale
often associated with electroweak symmetry breaking. When it comes online in 2008, the LHC and ATLAS will
work to discover, among other things, the Higgs boson and any other signatures for physics beyond the
Standard Model. As part of the ATLAS Inner Detector, the Transition Radiation Tracker will be an important
part of ATLAS's ability to make precise measurements of particle properties. This paper summarizes work done
to study and categorize the performance of the TRT, using a combination of cosmic ray test data from the SR1
facility and Monte Carlo simulation. In general, it was found that the TRT is working well, with module-level
efficiencies around 92% and module-level noise just above 2%. Reasonably good agreement was observed
with Monte Carlo, though there are some apparently pathological differences between the two that may deserve
further attention.
Here is the thesis in PDF: Wall_thesis.pdf