Browsing by Author "Molander, Andreas"

The Standard Model (SM) is the best established theory describing the observed matter and its interactions through all the fundamental forces except gravity. The SM is however not complete. For example, it does not explain the large difference between the electroweak scale and the Planck scale, which is known as the hierarchy problem, nor does it explain dark matter. Therefore there is a need for more comprehensive theories beyond the SM. Supersymmetry (SUSY) extends the SM with predictions of a partner particle (sparticle) for each currently known elementary particle. A few of its benefits are that it gives an explanation to the hierarchy problem and predicts the existence of a good particle candidate for dark matter. However, there is no experimental evidence for SUSY so far. The search for SUSY particles is currently on-going at the experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. So far, the searches have been focusing on strongly interacting supersymmetric particles, still without findings. One of the parameter ranges still to be covered, is the compressed mass scenario in the lower mass end for weakly interacting sparticles, where the masses of the lightest and second lightest supersymmetric particle do not differ much in mass. If they exist, low mass SUSY particles could be created in the LHC from two fusing photons emitted by forward-scattered protons. In such two-photon (central exclusive) processes, both protons might remain on-shell and continue their path down the beamline. Central exclusive processes are rather rare, so to advance the study of these events, new tagging techniques are required to record as many of these events as possible. We are interested in the kinematic range with a mass difference of less than 60 GeV between the slepton and the neutralino, which are the supersymmetric partners of the lepton and the neutral bosons. The CMS detector in the LHC has two event filtering (trigger) systems; the low level (L1) trigger and the high level trigger (HLT). A study has been conducted on how a specific HLT could increase the number of recorded events for the previously mentioned process, without significantly increasing the total HLT rate. To select more events, the transverse momentum threshold value of the produced leptons ought to be lowered. The forward-scattered protons will be detected by the Precision Proton Spectrometer (PPS). This thesis shows that requiring proton tracks in the PPS tracking detectors and tuning the multiplicity cut of these, will compensate for the lowering of the transverse momentum threshold, keeping the overall HLT rate sensible, while still enabling more interesting physics to be recorded.