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Description:
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN leads the energy frontier of particle physics.
With its unprecedented high collision energy, the LHC can probe and discover SUSY particles
up to a few TeV over the next years. Today's most stringent limits for Supersymmetry (SUSY) squarks and gluinos come from the 2010 and 2011 LHC data. By summer 2012, the dataset is expected to be significantly larger (~x4). This will be an exciting time to search for the rare process of direct top squark (stop) production. The stop search is one of the hottest particle physics topics these days, because of its connection to naturalness arguments.
The goal of this project is to improve the the SUSY stop search in the one lepton channel by using multi-variate analysis (MVA) techniques. The search for direct stop production is an ideal analysis to introduce an MVA. This is because it is a dedicated search for a specific signal process, hence the expected signal characteristics are well known. Secondly, in the case of a stop mass close to the top mass the search is challenging and can significantly profit from advanced analysis techniques.
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