Speaker
Description
Two Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detectors enable LHCb to identify charged hadrons between 2-100 GeV with unprecedented Cherenkov angle resolution. While primarily designed for particle identification, novel developments enable direct mass inference using reconstructed Cherenkov photons, paving the way for new precision mass measurements of charged hadrons.
This work presents the practical implementation, developmental steps taken and challenges encountered so far. Highlighted are two complementary approaches. One performs a mass fit by minimising a global likelihood constructed from reconstructed Cherenkov information. The other directly reconstructs a mass value at the per-photon and per-track level. The structure of the global fit, treatment of angular offsets, and construction of fit inputs are described.
A feasibility study probing the precision of such measurements alongside toy studies which model the Cherenkov response within the RICH are presented. Sample selection methods are also presented, which kinematically isolate kaons, pions and protons independently of any particle identification capability. Monte Carlo samples generated using these selections are used to evaluate the performance of each methodology and are included in the study.