Publications

The magnetic monopole is a hypothetical particle with a magnetic charge. It is an important field configuration in many Grand Unified Theories. Dirac in 1931 derived a charge quantization condition, which suggests that the existence of one magnetic monopole in the universe will explain electric charge quantization. Since then, a search of the elusive particle has begun, and yet all came with negative results. The NOνA Far Detector is able to probe some of the parameter space for the search for monopoles. To achieve this, two dedicated triggers, one for fast monopoles and the other for slow monopoles, have been developed to record signals. Results for the first 8 months of high-gain slow monopole data were obtained, and a 90% CL limit was established with no monopole observed. The analysis in this thesis is focused on new data with a higher gain, and we have explored potential improvement in efficiency and improvements in the reconstruction algorithm. We have done this analysis on Monte-Carlo generated simulated data to establish efficiencies and examined a control set of the new data to understand its differences from the old.

In this study, the concept of magnetically charged black hole is discussed through calculating the angular momentum (L) of its interaction with an electric test charge. Results confirm that the angular momentum form will agree with the prediction of no-hair theorem and we will show that L will depend on the distance between the charge and the black hole.

The CMS silicon tracker consists of two tracking devices utilizing semiconductor technology: the inner pixel and the outer strip detectors. They operate in a high-occupancy and high-radiation environment presented by particle collisions in the LHC. The tracker detectors occupy the region around the center of CMS, where the LHC beams collide, between 4 cm and 110 cm in radius and up to 280 cm along the beam axis. The pixel detector consists of 66 million pixels, covering about 1 m{ extasciicircum}2 total area. It is surrounded by the strip tracker with 10 million read-out channels covering about 200 m{ extasciicircum}2 total area. In this study, details are given about the performance of the strip tracker at high occupancy with respect to local observables such as signal to noise ratio and hit reconstruction efficiency. Studies of strip hit resolution that affects the quality of track reconstruction.