Intercalibration of the barrel electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS experiment at start-up
Calibration of the relative response of the individual channels of the barrel electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS detector was accomplished, before installation, with cosmic ray muons and test beams. One fourth of the calorimeter was exposed to a beam of high energy electrons and the relative calibration of the channels, the intercalibration, was found to be reproducible to a precision of about 0.3%. Additionally, data were collected with cosmic rays for the entire ECAL barrel during the commissioning phase. By comparing the intercalibration constants obtained with the electron beam data with those from the cosmic ray data, it is demonstrated that the latter provide an intercalibration precision of 1.5% over most of the barrel ECAL. The best intercalibration precision is expected to come from the analysis of events collected in situ during the LHC operation. Using data collected with both electrons and pion beams, several aspects of the intercalibration procedures based on electrons or neutral pions were investigated.

title: Search for the standard model Higgs boson produced in association with a top-quark pair in pp collisions at the LHC
abstract: A bstractA search for the standard model Higgs boson produced in association with a top-quark pair is presented using data samples corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb−1 (5.1 fb−1) collected in pp collisions at the center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV (8 TeV). Events are considered where the top-quark pair decays to either one lepton+jets $ \left( {\mathrm{t}\overline{\mathrm{t}}\to \ell \nu \mathrm{q}\overline{\mathrm{q}}\prime \mathrm{b}\overline{\mathrm{b}}} \right) $ or dileptons $ \left( {\mathrm{t}\overline{\mathrm{t}}\to {\ell^{+}}\nu {\ell^{-}}\overline{\nu}\mathrm{b}\overline{\mathrm{b}}} \right) $, ℓ being an electron or a muon. The search is optimized for the decay mode $ \mathrm{H}\to \mathrm{b}\overline{\mathrm{b}} $. The largest background to the $ \mathrm{t}\overline{\mathrm{t}}\mathrm{H} $ signal is top-quark pair production with additional jets. Artificial neural networks are used to discriminate between signal and background events. Combining the results from the 7 TeV and 8 TeV samples, the observed (expected) limit on the cross section for Higgs boson production in association with top-quark pairs for a Higgs boson mass of 125 GeV is 5.8 (5.2) times the standard model expectation.

title: Search for new physics with long-lived particles decaying to photons and missing energy in pp collisions at $ \sqrt{s}=7 $ TeV
abstract: A bstractA search is performed for long-lived neutral particles decaying into a photon and invisible particles. An example of such a signature is the decay of the lightest neutralino with nonzero lifetime into a gravitino and a photon in gauge-mediated supersymmetry, with the neutralino as the next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle and the gravitino as the lightest. The search uses events containing photons, missing transverse energy, and jets. The impact parameter of the photon relative to the beam-beam collision point can be reconstructed using converted photons. The method is sensitive to lifetimes of the order of 0.1 to 1 ns. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 2.23 fb−1 in pp collisions at $ \sqrt{s}=7 $ TeV, recorded in the first part of 2011 by the CMS experiment at the LHC. Cross-section limits are presented on pair production for such particles, each of which decays into a photon and invisible particles. The observed 95% confidence level limits vary between 0.11 and 0.21 pb, depending on the neutral particle lifetime.

title: Performance of the CMS Drift Tube Chambers with Cosmic Rays
abstract: Studies of the performance of the CMS drift tube barrel muon system are described, with results based on data collected during the CMS Cosmic Run at Four Tesla. For most of these data, the solenoidal magnet was operated with a central field of 3.8 T. The analysis of data from 246 out of a total of 250 chambers indicates a very good muon reconstruction capability, with a coordinate resolution for a single hit of about 260 microns, and a nearly 100% efficiency for the drift tube cells. The resolution of the track direction measured in the bending plane is about 1.8 mrad, and the efficiency to reconstruct a segment in a single chamber is higher than 99%. The CMS simulation of cosmic rays reproduces well the performance of the barrel muon detector.

title: Data filtering in the readout of the CMS Electromagnetic Calorimeter
abstract: For an efficient data taking, the Electromagnetic Calorimeter data of the CMS experiment must be limited to 10% of the full event size (1MB). Other requirements limit the average data size to 2kB per data acquisition link. These conditions imply a reduction factor of close to twenty on the data collected. The data filtering in the readout of the Electromagnetic Calorimeter detector is discussed. Test beam data are used to study the digital filtering applied in the readout channels and a full detector simulation allows to estimate the energy thresholds to achieve the desired data suppression factor.

title: Performance of tau-lepton reconstruction and identification in CMS
abstract: The performance of tau-lepton reconstruction and identification algorithms is studied using a data sample of proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36 inverse picobarns collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. The tau leptons that decay into one or three charged hadrons, zero or more short-lived neutral hadrons, and a neutrino are identified using final-state particles reconstructed in the CMS tracker and electromagnetic calorimeter. The reconstruction efficiency of the algorithms is measured using tau leptons produced in Z-boson decays. The tau-lepton misidentification rates for jets and electrons are determined.

title: Scalar Bilepton Dark Matter
abstract: In this work we show that 3-3-1 model with right-handed neutrinos has a natural weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter candidate. It is a complex scalar with mass of order of some hundreds of GeV which carries two units of lepton number, a scalar bilepton. This makes it a very peculiar WIMP, very distinct from supersymmetric or extra-dimension candidates. Besides, although we have to make some reasonable assumptions concerning the several parameters in the model, no fine tuning is required in order to get the correct dark matter abundance. We also analyze the prospects for WIMP direct detection by considering recent and projected sensitivities for WIMP–nucleon elastic cross section from CDMS and XENON collaborations.

title: A mobile data acquisition system
abstract: A mobile data aquisition (MobiDAQ) was developed for the ATLAS central hadronic calorimeter (TileCal). MobiDAQ has been designed in order to test the functionalities of the TileCal front-end electronics and to acquire calibration data before the final back-end electronics were built and tested. MobiDAQ was also used to record the first cosmic ray events acquired by an ATLAS subdetector in the underground experimental area.

title: Online neural trigger for optimizing data acquisition during particle beam calibration tests with calorimeters
abstract: For LHC, the hadronic calorimetry of the ATLAS detector is performed by Tilecal, a scintillating tile calorimeter. For calibration purposes, a fraction of the Tilecal modules is placed in particle beam lines. Despite beam high quality, experimental beam contamination is observed and this masks the actual performance of the calorimeter. For optimizing the calibration task, an online neural particle classifier was developed for Tilecal. Envisaging a neural trigger for incoming particles, a neural process runs integrated to the data acquisition task and performs online training for particle identification. The neural classification performance is evaluated by correlating the neural response to classical methodology, confirming an ability for outsider identification at levels as high as 99.3%.

title: Neutrino Mixing and the Minimal 3-3-1 Model
abstract: In the minimal 3-3-1 model charged leptons come in a nondiagonal basis. Moreover, the Yukawa interactions of the model lead to a non-hermitian charged lepton mass matrix. In other words, the minimal 3-3-1 model presents a very complex lepton mixing. In view of this we check rigorously if the possible textures of the lepton mass matrices allowed by the minimal 3-3-1 model can lead or not to the neutrino mixing required by the recent experiments in neutrino oscillation.

title: Chiral parameters in a QCD-motivated model with confined and massive gluons
abstract: A one parameter model of a confined-gluon propagator has been formulated by Frank and Roberts recently, which has a great success explaining π − and ρ −meson observables. We show, computing few chiral parameters, that a small variation of this model considering an infrared finite gluon propagator with a dynamically generated gluon mass, can also fit data related to the chiral symmetry breaking. This allows a direct interpretation for the unique parameter involved in the model as the gluon mass scale.