The Search for Rare Non-Hadronic B-Meson Decays with Final-State Neutrinos Using the BABAR Detector
The Search for Rare Non-hadronic B-meson Decays with Final-state Neutrinos using the BABAR Detector Dana Lindemann Doctor of Philosophy Physics Department McGill University Montr´eal, Qu´ebec April 2012 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. c Dana Lindemann, 2012 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the members of the BABAR Collaboration and the PEP-II staff for their dedicated years of work and service to provide the luminosity and detector quality that enables me to analyse a wealth of data in these analyses. I also thank my supervisor, Professor Steven Robertson, for all of his excellent guidance, knowledge, and advice with which he has provided me over the course of my schooling. In addition, I am grateful to Paul Mercure, for his knowledgeable and frequent computing help; Malachi Schram, for the many fun and helpful conversations on our analyses; Miika Klemetti, whose code was an invaluable reference for me when I first began my analyses; and Racha Cheaib, with whom it has been a pleasure to collaborate and share an office. I also thank the members of the Leptonic analysis working group, not only for developing and improving the hadronic-tag reconstruction algorithm, but also for all their feedback on my analyses — particularly Steven Sekula, Guglielmo DeNardo, Silke Nelson, Aidan Randle-Conde, and Owen Long. Thank you to my two review committees, consisting of Ingrid Ofte, Elisabetta Baracchini, David Hilton, Kevin Flood, and Francesca De Mori, for the amount of work and time they spent on reviewing and improving my results and publication.
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