LHCb hybrid photon detectors and sensitivity to flavour specific asymmetry in neutral B-Meson mixing

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider started operation this year, 2008. LHCb is a precision heavy-flavour experiment at this collider. The precision of LHCb is greatly aided by the LHCb Ring Imaging Cherenkov system for the separation and identification of charged hadrons. This system uses pixel Hybrid Photon Detectors, an innovative new technology for single photon imaging. The simulation and testing of these photon detectors are reported and discussed. The photodetectors were measured to have reached or exceeded the specifications in key areas. In particular, the detector quantum efficiencies far exceed expectations, by a relative 27 %. The precision of LHCb will be used to examine CP-violation and rare decays of B-mesons. A key part of the physics programme will be a measurement of the CP-violating flavour specific asymmetry in neutral B-meson mixing. This asymmetry is expected to be very small in the Standard Model, of order 10-4, however it is very sensitive to new physics, which can increase the asymmetry dramatically. We present an improved event selection and a novel method to control systematics. This will enable us to make a world-leading measurement of this parameter in one nominal year of data taking (2 fb-1).